Chapter 1: Sixty on Thirds
The tenor at Upcott Petrock weighed nineteen hundredweight and a bit, and Gill Vosper had her right arm up inside her to the shoulder.
"Well?" Derek Coaker shouted up through the trapdoor.
"Hold on." The clapper hung against her cheek, cold as a field gate in January. She worked her fingers up past the ball to where the iron went into the crown staple and found what she'd come for: a little slop, a quarter-turn's worth, the kind of play that is nothing for ten years and then is a crack. "There you are, my lover. I knew you were hiding something."
"I'm not your lover."
"I was talking to the bell."
Tyler was crouched on the frame side above her with the big torch, narrating under his breath as if a film crew followed him round the West Country. "Day in the life. Boss has got her head in a bell. Smells like pennies and pigeons, to be fair."
"Jackdaws," Gill said. "Light on the staple, not on my ear."
She came out backwards, which is the only way to come out of a bell, and sat on the frame with her boots in the pit. The bell chamber of St Petrock's was the size of a farmhouse kitchen and twice as dirty: eight bells hanging mouth down in an oak frame from 1891, louvres on all four sides letting in slats of June, and on every flat surface the sticks that jackdaws bring into towers for reasons known only to jackdaws. The tenor took up a third of the room. Round her shoulder, pressed into the mould by a Cullompton man two hundred and fifty-nine years ago, ran I CALL THE QUICK TO CHURCH AND THE DEAD TO GRAVE. T. BILBIE 1767. Somebody had picked the letters out in gold paint for the Jubilee. A bell doesn't need gold paint. Thomas Bilbie would have spat.
"Photograph the bearing bolts," she told Tyler. "All eight, both sides."
"Why?"
"Because that's my paint on them." She tapped a bolt head with her pencil. In 2017 she'd painted the whole frame Brunswick green and every nut along with it, a skin of paint over each thread. Not one of them had a crack in it. "Nobody's had these open since I did. I like to know that."
"You like knowing things," Tyler said. "That's your whole personality."
"Somebody in this firm has to have one."
The clock hammer sat on its bracket by the tenor's lip, a lump of iron the size of a loaf on an iron arm, pulled back off the bell on its wire like a dog on a short lead. Gill gave the wire a look and climbed down the ladder into the clock chamber, where Derek was waiting with his arms folded over his belly and his cap on, indoors, as always. He let Tyler down after her, then reached up and shot the bolt on the underside of the trap: a barrel bolt the size of a finger, fitted in 1990 after the Moorcombe boys got up there one Christmas and tied a bra to the tenor's clapper.
He was seventy-seven and had farmed Higher Shilstone for fifty of those years, and he had the hands still, great red things like something you'd buy by the pound. He had been captain of this tower since 1982. He had taught Gill to ring in the room below when she was eleven, and thrown her out of it when she was sixteen for telling him his handstroke was late. It had been late then. It was late now. Neither of them had mentioned it in forty years.
"Your clapper's loose in her staple," she said.
"She's been loose in her staple since Wilson."
"Then she's due." Gill went to the wall where the hammer's wire came down through the ceiling to a cast-iron lever. When the bells were to be rung, the lever was pulled down and held with a pin through a hole in a quadrant, and the hammer stayed clear. If it didn't, the clock went on striking the hours into a bell that was swinging, and then you had a very bad afternoon. She put her thumb on the pin. It moved. The hole it sat in had worn oval. "This pin's walking, Derek."
"It's done forty years."
"So has your knee." She worked the pin to show him. "Five teams ringing her hard all afternoon and this'll creep. It comes out one Sunday, the hammer drops back, and the first time she swings past it you've got a lump of iron in your wheel. I saw it happen out past Holsworthy. Eleven spokes gone and the stay, and the bell stood on her head for a week because nobody could get near her."
Tyler, at the top of the ladder: "Did anyone die?"
"The churchwarden's dog went missing the same week. Nothing was proved." She turned back to Derek. "Look at it before you ring anything."
"I'll look at her before I ring her."
"Before you ring anything. Promise me."
He gave her the face he gave people who wanted something from him, which was most people. "I'll look at the bloody pin, maid."
The clock ticked on its iron bed beside them, a Smith of Derby flatbed from 1897 with its pendulum going down through a slot in the floor, as patient as someone tapping a pencil. Derek wound it every Saturday night. He'd shown Gill how when she was twelve, the one kindness she could clearly remember, and then told her she'd done it wrong.
They went down the second ladder to the ringing chamber. It was an old oak ladder, not fixed at the top, and forty years of it standing in the same spot had worn two hollows in the floorboards, neat as gouge work. The feet sat in them like eggs in a box.
"That wants a bracket at the top," she said, as she said every time.
"It's stood there since Coronation year."
"So you keep telling me."
"Then stop asking."
The ringing chamber was whitewashed and cold even in June. Peal boards on the walls, gold letters on black, every Major Final Upcott had won since 1931. A board in Derek's own capitals, varnished in: NO PERSON IN THE BELFRY WHILE ANY BELL IS UP. D. COAKER, CAPT. The eight ropes were coiled and hung on their hooks, the sallies red, white and blue, gone grey at the grip where a hundred thousand hands had held them.
"Them are yours," Derek said. He didn't make it a compliment.
"Mine." She lifted the tenor's tail end off its hook. Through the last foot of it, worked in between the strands, ran a thread of green wool. "Every rope I supply, I put a tracer through the tail. Different colour every year. Green's 2017." She dropped it for Tyler to catch. "You see one of mine with no tracer, it isn't mine."
"Can I do the colours next year?"
"No."
"I'd do orange."
"That's why."
The tenor's rope was longer than the others. The tail end came down past her knee. Derek liked it long; he rang with it round his shins like a cowman holding a halter, and the sally came down to meet him at a height for a man of six foot two who'd stopped growing around the World Cup and never forgiven anyone.
"Will you ring today?" Tyler asked him. "As well as the competition?"
"After." Derek coiled the tenor rope back on its hook with two turns and a tuck, the Upcott way, his way, which was the way everyone in this tower tied a rope because he'd stood behind them until they did. "When they've all buggered off home, I give her a goodnight. Up, a minute, down. Just her and me."
"That's actually quite sweet."
"It isn't sweet, boy, it's maintenance. You don't put a horse away wet."
He took the quote out of his jacket. It was folded to the size of a beer mat and soft at the edges, and she could see he had been through it with a pencil: marks down every margin, and on the second page something underlined so hard the paper had torn. She couldn't see what. He unfolded only the front.
"Ninety-six thousand four hundred," he said.
"Plus the VAT, which you'll get back, which I explained. Bells to the foundry, tuned, back in a new frame, new everything. The deposit's due on signing."
"You'll have your deposit Monday." He said it as if Monday was a word he'd been saving for a while.
"I'll have it when I see it."
"Monday." He folded the quote back into his jacket. "Every penny, in front of you. You can bring that boy and he can film it."
There were feet on the spiral stair, quick ones, and a voice ahead of them. "I'm not coming in if anybody's swinging anything." Mandy Leaman came round the newel with a flask under one arm and a cake tin under the other and the shop's keys on a lanyard round her neck, all of five foot two and moving as if she was being timed. Gill had babysat her for fifty pence an hour in 1984. Mandy had bitten her. They'd got on well since.
"Look at the state of you both," Mandy said. "I came round by the church path, the square's full of Moorcombe cars already. Saffron buns. I've put sugar in all the coffees because I didn't know who has it, so if you don't, I'll just..." She didn't say what she'd just. She never did. She ran the shop and the post office counter and the tower's paperwork and the competition tea, and she rang the treble, and she had been tower secretary and treasurer of the Bell Restoration Fund since her husband left, which Iris Kingdon said was the only sensible thing he'd done.
"Amanda," Derek said.
"Derek."
"Monday. Bring the book."
"I always bring the book."
"Bring it Monday."
Mandy unscrewed the flask. Gill watched the coffee go into the cups, steady as you like. "Gill, you'll want two buns, you look like you've been up a chimney. Tyler, love, you'll want three, I can tell by looking."
"To be fair," said Tyler.
"Are you coming up to see your bells before they go to Loughborough?" Gill said. "Last chance. Next time you see her she'll be in a crate."
"I've rung that treble thirty-one years and never once been up that ladder, and I'm not starting for a saffron bun." Mandy put the lid on the tin. "They frighten me, those bells. Something that size has no business being up in the air."
At half past one the judges rang the bells, which is the rule, so they know what they're listening to. Gill took the tenor. She took a coil of the long tail in her left hand the way she'd been taught in this room at eleven, by the same man who was now standing by the door with his arms folded, and she pulled her off. A heavy bell comes off the balance like a cow getting up, back end first and with a grumble, and the grumble this one had was in her bearings, a dry little complaint at the bottom of each swing that went straight up the rope into Gill's hands. She'd write that down. She kept her right hand off the tail end until the bell had settled; there was a white ridge across that palm from 1989 and a tenor near Crediton that had got away from her, and it had made her careful. Roy Knapman, who was judging with her and had been judging since before she could ring, took the fifth and rang it badly and with total confidence.
"Your tenor's sticky in her bearings," she told Derek as they came down.
"She's nineteen hundredweight. She's allowed."
At two the Reverend Jo Ilbert took the service in eleven minutes flat, because she had nine parishes and a spaniel and a wedding in Chagford at four. Forty ringers in their competition shirts sang the ringers' hymn with the enthusiasm of men who'd be asked about it afterwards. Then the draw, the team names on folded paper in Derek's cap. Langaford first. Upcott Petrock second. Cheriton Wyke, Sowden. Moorcombe last. Tony Westaway, Moorcombe's captain, said something under his breath that the vicar pretended not to hear.
Martin Ashby caught Gill at the lychgate as she went out. He had a recorder the size of a television remote clipped to the churchyard wall, a furry windshield on its microphone like a small dead animal. He'd bought the Old Rectory four years ago and learned to ring and was recording every peal for the restoration appeal's film, and Derek let him because the appeal needed the money and Martin was most of it.
"With respect, Gill," Martin said, "you'll back me. Two new trebles while the bells are out. Ten bells. It's the obvious time."
"I hang them, my lover, I don't vote on them."
"Ten bells and we could ring methods. Proper methods. Plain Bob is a perfectly civilised..."
"You'll put two trebles in my tower," Derek said, coming out of the porch behind him, "when I'm under that grass, and not before."
The judges are kept out of sight of the tower door, so they can't see which team goes up. Roy judged from his Volvo, parked by the old forge at the top of Church Lane with the windows down and a bag of Murray Mints on the dashboard. Gill judged from Iris Kingdon's back bedroom, as she had for six years, with the sash up eight inches and the chair turned to face the tower's south side, the louvres, the jackdaws going in and out.
Iris was eighty-eight and deaf in her left ear and had views. She brought up a schooner of sweet sherry at twenty past two whether you wanted it or not.
"I'll keep the wireless off."
"Thank you, Iris."
"I've heard these bells eighty-eight years and they've never once sounded like the wireless." She stood in the doorway. "You'll give ours the cup."
"I don't know which are ours. That's the point."
"You'll know. Ours sound smug."
The fault sheet was the Association's form, a grid for every section of the test piece: the rise in peal, the rounds, sixty changes called, rounds again, the fall. Gill sharpened two HB pencils with a Stanley knife and laid them side by side on Iris's windowsill, next to a china shepherdess with no head.
Langaford came up like a bag of spanners falling downstairs and never recovered. She gave them fifty-five and felt bad about it.
At five past three the second team started the rise, eight bells swinging out from rest together, the sound building out of the tower in a slow tide, the strikes ragged at first and then pulling into each other until they rang in rounds. Gill knew in a dozen blows. She'd have known them if they'd rung under a mattress. She bent over the sheet.
They were good. They were very good, which was annoying. The rounds sat. The calls went through clean. The six, which would be Ray Northcott, was as steady as a gatepost. The second was snatching at hand now and then, quick and bright and a shade too pleased with itself, which would be Derek's grandson Callum, seventeen and knew it. She gave him a half and wrote in the margin, because nobody would ever read the margins: Callum, she'll wait for you. Leanne and Dean Squance on the fourth and fifth were married and rang like it, never quite together, never apart. But there at every handstroke, right at the bottom of the row, was the tenor, holding up at the balance a hair longer than it should, the whole row waiting for her, the way the whole of Upcott had been waiting for Derek Coaker since 1982. Gill marked it. Half a fault. Another half. A man making the bus wait.
And the treble was at it too, snatching at hand. Twice in the same row of the changes the first bell came in early, hurried, as if somebody was about to take the rope off her. Gill marked it: Mandy, it's not a race.
They came down clean. She put twenty-nine and a half at the bottom of the sheet and sat back and drank half of Iris's sherry without meaning to.
"That was ours," said Iris from the landing.
"I couldn't possibly say."
"Smug," said Iris, satisfied, and went down.
At three o'clock the clock hadn't struck, and at four it didn't either. Gill had been braced for it both times. In 2019 Derek had forgotten to pull the hammer off and the clock had struck four slap in the middle of Moorcombe's rounds, and Roy had given them a fault for it out of pure principle, and Tony Westaway had written to the Association about it on lined paper in green ink. He'd been beaten by Upcott ever since.
Cheriton Wyke were competent and Gill couldn't remember them by the time they'd finished. Sowden's conductor called the treble the wrong way in the fortieth change and the whole band went off like a dropped tray. Eighty-eight. Between teams Iris came up with the bottle and the news.
"They shot forty-one of Philip's at the spring test. In the yard. He stood and watched every one." Iris sat on the end of the bed. "TB. They've had the restriction on since March. He can't sell a calf. Derek won't sign the farm over, and Philip's fifty-one and doesn't own a fencepost. He's been worse since Pam went. Seven years in October."
"Iris."
"I'm only saying. The shop won't see Christmas either. Not with the Co-op van in the square Tuesdays." Iris lowered her voice, which made it louder. "And that Ashby. He records them, you know. The bells. I've told him they're not his to record."
Moorcombe went up at twenty-five to five, last of the day, and rang the best rounds Gill had heard from them in years, and then made a mess of the fall, the bells coming down in a heap at the bottom like wet cake. She gave them forty-one. They were down and still at two minutes to five.
She added up. Upcott had it by eleven and a half on her sheet. She'd have to see Roy's. She sat with the pencil behind her ear and listened to the tower go quiet, the jackdaws settling back, a car starting somewhere up the lane and going away too fast.
At eight minutes past five a single bell began to go up.
A bell rung up on its own sounds like nothing else. There's the swing you can't hear, and then the clapper finds the side of her, one blow, soft, and a long gap, and another, a little bigger, and the gaps closing as she climbs, until she's going round full circle and speaking every time, slow, enormous, like a man talking to himself in an empty house. It was the tenor. Of course it was the tenor. Derek's goodnight.
Gill didn't mean to listen to it like a judge. She just did. The pencil was already in her hand. At the bottom of Moorcombe's sheet, in the margin, she wrote 17.08 D's goodnight, and then, because she had been marking that man's handstroke for forty-five years and could not help it:
Not a blow late at hand. Snatching, if you please. Fifty years, and he waits till nobody's marking.
He gave her a minute up, the big bell going round on her own, then rang her down, the blows shortening and softening until there was just the swing again, and then nothing. Gill wrote down 17.13 and put the pencil away.
Iris called up the stairs. "That's Derek saying goodnight to her."
"It is."
"Soppy old sod," said Iris, with enormous tenderness.
Roy came at half past with his sheet in a plastic wallet and a mint going in his cheek. He'd got Upcott on thirty-one and Moorcombe on forty-three, and they agreed the order down to the bottom, which they nearly always did, which was why they were asked.
"You were hard on Langaford," he said.
"Langaford were hard on me."
"Westaway went past me at four minutes past five like a scalded cat. I don't think we'll be seeing him at the results." Roy put the sheets together and squared them on his knee. "Did you hear Derek's goodnight? Sweetest I've ever heard him ring her."
"He never rang like that for me."
"Nobody ever did anything for you, Gill. You never let them." He said it kindly, which was worse.
The village hall was across the square, past the lychgate and the shop with its blinds down. It smelled of hot urn and wet wool and four dozen splits. Mandy's rule was cream first, then jam, as God and the county intended, and she had a sign up to say so in case of Cornishmen. Leanne Squance, who'd rung the fourth, was buttering at the end of a trestle with her sleeves up.
"Two minutes, she said." Leanne didn't look up. "Two minutes to fetch the cream. I've done sixty splits on my own and my hands are like a dairymaid's."
"I've been back twenty minutes, Leanne, you've had your moan." Mandy came past with a jug in each hand. "That shop alarm takes a fortnight to set, I swear it does." She had a plaster on her right palm, a big square one across the heel of the hand, and she held the jug handle with her fingers so she didn't have to close her fist. "Caught it on the freezer lid. That thing's a guillotine. Gill, tea? Roy, you'll want it stewed, I know you."
Gill took her tea to the hatch.
Ray Northcott was by the hatch with a split in each hand like a man who'd been told they were rationed. He was seventy-four and had been the postman here for thirty years, and he still looked at every house as if he knew what came through its door, because he did.
"He'll be up there putting the hammer on," Ray said. "Then he'll wind her. He'll come when he's ready."
"He always does," said Gill.
"Fair play, he always does."
Philip Coaker came in behind them with mud to the knee and said he'd been up to see a heifer, to nobody in particular. He took a mug of tea in both hands as if he were warming them on a calf. His boy Callum was by the stage with his competition shirt untucked and his phone out, already telling someone in Exeter. Martin Ashby was photographing the cup, a squat silver thing on a black plinth, from three angles, and then the splits.
At a quarter to six Roy climbed onto the stage and read the results as if they were names on a war memorial. Sowden. Langaford. Cheriton Wyke. Moorcombe, eighty-four. A pause he enjoyed.
"Upcott Petrock. Sixty and a half."
The hall made the noise a hall makes. Callum whooped. Ray put both splits down at once.
"Derek?" said Roy, holding the cup out to the room.
There was no Derek.
"He's sulking," somebody said, "because he only won by twenty-three and a half," and everyone laughed, and Roy put the cup back on its plinth and got down. People ate. The urn ticked. At five to six Mandy, going past with the teapot, put her hand on Philip's arm.
"Go and fetch your father before it's all gone," she said. "He'll want to be photographed with that cup, you know he will. He'll not forgive any of us."
Philip put his mug down and went.
Gill was listening for the clock. If Derek had put the hammer back on, it would strike six on the tenor, the way it had every hour of every day of her childhood, so steady you stopped hearing it. She stood by the hatch with her tea going cold and waited for it.
Six o'clock came and the clock didn't strike.
She was the only one in the hall who noticed. A minute later Philip Coaker came back through the door with no colour in his face at all, and looked straight past his own son, past the cup and the splits and the whole of the room, at her.
"Gill," he said.