As often as he’d seen it, Ern had never ceased to be amazed that such a beautiful and perfect thing could ever come to be amongst the sprawl of dirty closes, inns and tapering corridors, amongst the prostitutes and the pornographers. Across the puddle-silvered slabs it rose with its two towers like hands flung up in a Hosanna to the churning heavens, grimmer than when Ern had left for work despite the way the day had lightened naturally as it wore on since then. The broad cathedral steps with raindrops dancing on them swept down in two flights calling to mind the tucks around a trailing surplice hem, where over that the six pairs of white Doric columns holding up the portico dropped down in billowed folds, unlaundered in the city’s bonfire pall. The spires that flanked the wide façade to either side, two hundred feet or more in height, had what seemed all of London’s pigeons crowded on their ledges under dripping overhangs of stonework, sheltering against the weather.
Huddling amongst the birds as if they had themselves just flown down from unfriendly skies to roost in the cathedral eaves were stone apostles, with St. Paul himself perched on the portico’s high ridge and gathering his sculpted robes up round him to prevent them trailing in the grime and wet. At the far right of the most southern tower sat a disciple, Ern had no idea which one, who had his head tipped back and seemed to watch the tower’s clock intently, waiting for his shift to finish so that he could flap off home down Cheapside through the drizzle, back to Aldgate and the East. Climbing the soaked and slippery steps with fresh spots drumming on his hat-brim, Ernest had to chuckle at the irreligious notion of the statues intermittently producing liquid marble stools, Saints’-droppings that embittered parish workers would be paid to scrape away. Taking a last peer at the boiling mass of bruised cloud overhead before he slipped between the leftmost pillars and towards the north aisle entrance, he concluded that the rain was getting worse if anything, and that today he would undoubtedly be better off indoors. Stamping his boots and shaking off his sodden jacket as he crossed the threshold into the cathedral he heard the first muffled drum-roll of approaching thunder off at the horizon’s rim, confirming his suspicion.
In comparison to the October torrent pouring down outside, St. Paul’s was warm and Ern felt briefly guilty at the thought of Anne and their two children drawn up shivering to the deficient fire back home in East Street. Ernest walked along the North Aisle under the suspicious frowns of passing clergy towards the construction and activity at its far end, only remembering to snatch his sopping bonnet off at the last minute and to carry it before him humbly in both hands. With every ringing step he felt the vistas and the hidden volumes of the stupefying edifice unfolding up above him and upon all sides, as he veered from the north aisle’s curved recesses on his left and passed between the building’s great supporting columns to the nave.
Framed by St. Paul’s huge piers there in the central transept space beneath the dome milled labourers like Ern himself, their scruffy coats and britches a dull autumn palette of dust greys and browns, shabby against the richness of the paintings hung around them, the composure of the monuments and statues. Some of them were lads Ern knew of old, which was the way he’d come by this appreciated stint of paid work in the first place, with a word put in to them as were contracted for the cleaning and restoring. Men were scrubbing with soft cloths at lavishly-carved choir-stalls bossed with grapes and roses at the far end of the quire, while in the spandrels between arches underneath the railed hoop of the Whispering Gallery above were other fellows, giving the mosaic prophets and four Gospel-makers something of a wash and brush-up. Most of the endeavour though, it seemed to Ern, was centred on the mechanism overshadowing the nearly hundred-foot-wide area immediately below the yawning dome. It was perhaps the most ingenious thing that Ern had ever seen.
Hanging from the top centre of the dome, fixed to the crowning lantern’s underside at what Ern guessed must be the strongest point of the vast structure, itself with a tonnage in the tens of thousands, was a plumb-straight central spindle more then twenty storeys high that had on one side an assemblage nearly as tall made of poles and planks, while on the other side what had to have been London’s largest sandbag hung from a gigantic crossbeam as a counterweight. The sack sagged from a hawser on the left, while to Ern’s right the heavy rope-hung framework that it balanced out was shaped like an enormous pie-slice with its narrow end towards the centre where it joined securely with the upright central axis. This impressive scaffolding contained a roughly quarter-circle wedge of flooring that could be winched up and down by pulleys at its corners, so as to reach surfaces that needed work at any level of the dome. The mast-like central pivot was hung almost to the decorative solar compass in the middle of the transept floor, with what looked like a smaller version of a horizontal mill-wheel at its bottom by which means the whole creaking arrangement could be manually rotated to attend each vaulted quadrant in its turn. The pulley-hoisted platform in the midst of its supporting struts and girders was where Ern would be employed for the remainder of the day, all being well.
A fat pearl cylinder of failing daylight coloured by the worsening storm outside dropped from the windows of the Whispering Gallery to the cathedral’s flooring down below, dust lifted by the bustling industry caught up as a suspension in its filmy shaft. The soft illumination filtering from overhead rendered the workmen with a Conté crayon warmth and grain as they bent diligently to their various enterprises. Ern stood almost mesmerised admiring this effect when to the right ahead of him, out of the south aisle and its stairs from the triforium gallery above there came a striding, rotund figure that he recognised, who called to him by name.
“Oi, Ginger. Ginger Vernall. Over here, you silly beggar.”
It was Billy Mabbutt, who Ern knew from different pubs in Kennington and Lambeth and who’d landed him this opportunity to earn a bit of money, like a good ’un. His complexion florid to the point of looking lately cooked, Bill Mabbutt was a heartening sight with his remaining sandy hair a half-mast curtain draped behind his ears around the rear of that bald cherry pate, the braces of his trousers stretched across a button-collared shirt with sleeves rolled boldly back to show his ham-hock forearms. These were pumping energetically beside him like the pistons of a locomotive as he barrelled towards Ern, weaving between the other labourers who drifted back and forth through rustling, echoing acoustics on their disparate errands. Smiling at the pleasure that he always felt on meeting Billy mingled with relief that this much-needed job had not turned out to be a false alarm, Ernest began to walk in the direction of his old acquaintance, meeting him halfway. The high lilt of Bill’s voice always surprised Ern, coming as it did from those boiled bacon features, lined with sixty years and two campaigns – in Burma and Crimea – with this last being the place the two had met. The older man, who’d been a quartermaster, had adopted what appeared to be the shot-and-shell repellent Ernie as his red-haired lucky charm.
“Gor, blow me, Ginger, you’re a sight for sore eyes. I was upstairs in the Whispering Gallery just now, looking at all the work there is to do and getting in a right commotion ’cause I swore blind as you’d not show up, but now you’ve come and made me out a liar.”
“Hello, Bi
ll. I’ve not got ’ere too late, then?”
Mabbutt shook his head and gestured in between the hulking piers to where a gang of men were struggling as they adjusted the immense contraption there at the cathedral’s heart, dependent from its dome.
“No, you’re all right, boy. It’s the mobile gantry what’s been messing us about. All over everywhere, she was, so if you’d got ’ere sooner you’d have only been sat on your ’ands. I reckon as we’ve got ’er settled now, though, by the looks of things, so if you want to come across we’ll get you started.”
One fat and the other thin, one with a pale complexion and red hair, the other with its opposite, the two men sauntered down the nave, over the resonant and gleaming tiles, and passed between its final columns to where all the work was going on. As they drew nearer to the dangling monster that Bill had referred to as the mobile gantry, Ern revised with each fresh pace his estimate regarding the thing’s size. Close to, that twenty floors of scaffolding was more like thirty, from which he inferred that he’d be at his job two or three hundred feet above the ground, a disconcerting prospect even given Ernest’s celebrated head for heights.
Two labourers, one of whom Ernest knew was brawling Albert Pickles from up Centaur Street, were stripped down to their singlets as they pushed the cog-like mill wheel in the middle round a final notch or two, rotating the whole feat of engineering on its axis while they trudged their orbit-path round the mosaic sun at the dead centre of the transept, its rays flaring to the cardinal directions. With their efforts, the men brought about the groaning framework on the spindle’s right until it was aligned exactly with one of the eight great orange-segment sections into which the overarching bowl had been divided up. As the huge scaffold moved, so too did its enormous sandbag counterweight off to the left side of the axial pole, suspended from the crossbeam far above. Four or five navvies stood about it, walking round beside the hanging sackcloth boulder, steadying it as it wobbled with a foot or two of clearance over the church floor.
Ern noticed that the bag had sprung a leak, a small hole in the fabric of its underside with an apprentice of fourteen or so scuffing about there on his knees beside the sack, sweating and swearing as he tried to darn the rend with thread and needle. The boy was disfigured by what people called a strawberry mark staining his skin across one eye from cheek to forehead in a mongrel puppy patch, whether from birth or from a scald Ern couldn’t say. The milky, stormcloud-filtered radiance dropped down upon the youth from overhead like in Greek dramas as he grovelled at his mending, with the hourglass grains spilling across his darting fingers, falling in a thin stream on the lustrous slabs below. As Ern gazed idly on this scene, thinking inevitably of the sands of time, the picture’s lighting jumped and lurched, followed not several seconds later by a cannon fusillade of thunder. The squall’s eye was evidently drawing nearer.
Billy Mabbutt led Ern past where men were fastening the gantry’s trailing guy-ropes down to anchor it now it had been positioned properly, over to a trestle that had been set up between the statues of Lord Nelson and the late Viceroy of Ireland Lord Cornwallis, who’d surrendered in the Yankee independence war to General Washington if Ern remembered all his history right. Lord knows why they should want to give him such a grand memorial. The kit that Ern would need to make his restorations was set out upon the makeshift table where another young apprentice, this one slightly older, was already separating eggs by pouring them from one cracked china teacup to another. Workmen stood about the trestle waiting to begin their tasks and Billy loudly introduced Ern as the pair rolled up to join the crew.
“It’s all right, chaps, the decorator’s come. This ’ere is me old ’oppo Ginger Vernall. A right Rembrandt on the quiet, is Ginger.”
Ern shook hands with all the men and hoped they didn’t grudge the fact that he was the skilled labour on this job and would be getting more than they did. Probably they understood that he might not have any work like this again for months, while brawny labourers were always needed, and at any rate the money was so poor that neither party had a cause for envy. Him and Billy Mabbutt conferred briefly on the ins and outs of what he was to do, and then Ern went about transferring his required materials and tools from off the tabletop onto the quarter-cheese shaped wooden flooring slung inside the framework of the moveable arrangement.
He selected an array of squirrel brushes from the tin-full that the St. Paul’s clergy had provided and, as well, the cardboard lid off an old shoebox serving as a tray for all the cleaned-out varnish tubs containing the cathedral’s range of powder-paints. Of these, the purple and the emerald green had caught the damp and clotted into crumbly gems, but Ern didn’t expect that he would need these colours and the other pigments seemed to have been kept in a much better state. The surly youngster who’d been put in charge of separating out the eggs was finishing the last of half a dozen when Ern asked if he could have his yolks. These were unbroken in one basin while another pot held the unwanted whites, a viscous slop that looked obscenely like collected drool which would no doubt be put to other use and not go wasted. Carefully transporting his receptacle with the six yellow globs sliding around each other at its bottom, Ern set it upon the pulley-mounted platform with the brushes and the colours then fetched mixing bowls, a two-pound sack of gypsum and half-gallon cider flagon washed and filled with water. Adding glass paper and three or four clean cloths, Ern climbed onto the swaying wedge of deck beside the trappings of his craft and with a tight grip on one of its corner-ropes, he gave the signal for Bill Mabbutt’s men to winch him up.
The first jolt of his footing when it lifted had another momentary splash of silver from outside for its accompaniment, the subsequent protracted boom coming just instants later as the storm-head neared. One of the burly fellows hauling down upon his rope with a bell-ringer’s grip made some crack about God moving his furniture around upstairs at which another of the gang protested, saying the remark was disrespectful in that great Mother of Churches, although Ern had heard the saying since his boyhood and saw nothing wrong with it. There was a practicality behind the phrase that tickled him, for while within his heart of hearts Ern wasn’t altogether sure if he believed in God, he liked the notion of the Lord as someone down-to-earth who might occasionally, as did we all, have call to rearrange things so that they were better suited to His purposes. The pulleys shrieked as Ern made his ascent in measured stages, eighteen inches at a time, and when the lightning flashed again to outline everything in sudden chalk the deafening explosion in its wake was near immediate.
The broad curve of his platform’s outmost edge eclipsed more of the ground below with every squealing half-yard that it gained in height. The greater part of Ernest’s gang of workmates was already gone from sight beneath the swaying raft of planks he stood upon, with Billy Mabbutt at the group’s rear lifting up one ruddy palm in a farewell before he too was out of view. Now Ern took stock of the wood floor beneath his feet he realised that it was much larger than he’d first supposed, almost as big as a theatre stage with his small heap of jugs and pots and brushes looking lonely and inadequate there at its centre. Fully raised, he thought, and a full quadrant of the transept would be made invisible to Ern, and he to it. The heads of first Cornwallis then Lord Nelson vanished, swallowed by the elevating podium’s perimeter, and Ernest was alone. Tilting his head he gazed at Sir James Thornhill’s eight vast frescoes on the dome’s interior as he rose by instalments up into their company.
Back when he’d been a small boy in the early 1840s Ern had learned to draw a bit when he’d risked piles by sitting on a cold stone step and watching Jackie Thimbles recreate in chalk the death of Nelson at Trafalgar on the flagstones by the corner of the Kennington and Lambeth Roads, day after fascinated day. Jackie was in his sixties then, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars who’d lost two fingertips on his left hand to gangrene and concealed the stumps beneath a pair of silver thimbles. Making now a threadbare living as a pavement artist, the old man had seemed quite glad of young Ern’s daily company, and was a mine of information about painting. He’d regale the boy with long accounts, shot through with yearning, of the marvellous new oil paints that were then available to them as had the money, bright laburnum yellows and rich mauves or violets like a copse at dusk. Jackie had taught Ern how to mix a realistic flesh tone from a range of hues you’d never think were in pink skin, and how the fingers could be useful when it came to blending, smoothly smudging a white highlight cast by burning warships down the dying admiral’s cheek or on the polished timbers of the Victory. Ernest had thought his mentor the most talented of men, but looking up at Thornhill’s masterpieces now he understood them to be from a realm as far above the blood and fire washed decks of Jackie Thimbles as the halls of Heaven surely were above the streets of Lambeth.
Episodes from Saint Paul’s life surrounded Ern as he rode his ramshackle elevator up amongst them, from the Damascene conversion to a vividly depicted shipwreck, with the various disciples under-lighted as though by a forge or opened treasure chest while ray-pierced cloudscapes roiled behind. The fresco that Ern planned to clean up and retouch today, over upon the echoing concavity’s southwestern side, was one that he was not familiar with from sermons. In its background was a place of warm, rough stones that might have been a gaol, with stood before this a wide-eyed and wretched man whose awe seemed to be at the very brink of terror, gazing at the haloed saints or angels who looked back with lowered eyes and small, secretive smiles.
Ern’s wooden dais climbed now past the Whispering Gallery where one could fancy that the walls still crept with century-old prayers and where the windows allowed Ern his final glimpse out over a drenched London to Southwark Cathedral’s tower in the south-east before he was moved higher, up into the dome itself. Around the lowest rim of this, on the encircling tambour just above the gallery, he was dismayed to note that a whole swathe of border detail at the bottom of each fresco had been covered over in stone-coloured paint, no doubt to easily and inexpensively mask wat
er-damage that had been discovered during earlier renovations. Ern was muttering beneath his breath about the shameful lack of pride in one’s endeavours showing in this shoddy workmanship when blinding brilliance and tumultuous din so close they were a single thing exploded all about him and his platform dropped a sickening inch or two as startled bruisers far below lost then regained their grips upon the pulley-ropes. Ern’s heart was thudding while his suddenly precarious stand resumed its screeching progress upwards and he cautiously approached its right rear crook thinking he’d risk a peek down just to see if all was well.
As he wrapped one tight round the rope, Ern found his hands were wringing wet with perspiration, so that he supposed he must be frightened of heights after all, despite what everyone had always said. He peered down past the planking’s rough-cut ends and, though he could not see his fellow workers, was astounded to find how far up he was. The St. Paul’s clergy looked like earwigs inching over the white, distant floor and Ernest watched with some amusement as two of the clerics waddled unaware towards each other along the adjacent sides of a giant pier, colliding at the corner in a flurry of black skirts. It wasn’t the mere sight of a downed clergyman that made Ern chuckle, but his realisation that he’d known the two priests would bump into one another before they themselves did, just by virtue of his lofty vantage point. To an extent he had been able to perceive the destinies of land-bound people moving back and forth on their flat plane from the superior perspective of a third dimension up above theirs that they seldom thought about or paid attention to. Ernest imagined this was why the Romans had got on so well, seizing the tallest peaks as lookout posts and watchtowers in their conquests, their perceptions and their strategies both wonderfully advantaged by the higher ground.
His perch had by now reached the level he’d agreed with Billy Mabbutt, where it came to rest and was tied off, securely Ernest hoped, more than two hundred feet below. He was around the upper reaches of his first appointed fresco with the cloudburst’s flickering, percussive heart an almost constant presence right above him now. Once his expanse of floor space had stopped moving, Ern decided to begin his restorations with a halo-sporting figure in the picture’s upper left, angel or saint he couldn’t tell, the face of which had been somewhat discoloured by decades of censer-fume and candle smoke. He started gently with his cloths, stood there upon the platform’s brim wiping the smuts and layered dust from a visage he was surprised to find measured at least four feet from crown to chin when seen from right up next to it, the almost girlish features turned halfway towards the right and looking down demurely with the small lips pursed in that same smugly knowing smile. An angel, Ern decided, on the basis that those saints he could remember all had beards.
Ern was all on his own in what seemed the bare-boarded attic of the world, much more elaborately decorated and more spacious than the one at his mum’s house in East Street. Once he’d cleaned off as much superficial grime as he could manage from a quarter-profile near as long as he was, Ernest settled to the serious affair of mixing up a shade that would exactly match the holy being’s weathered peach complexion. Using the least mucky-looking handle of a brush that he could find he whipped the six yolks in their basin, then allowed a miserly amount of the resulting copper cream to pour into one of his mixing bowls. Another brush-handle served as a slender spoon with which Ern measured minute servings of what he believed to be the necessary colours from their varnish-tubs, wiping the brush-stem after every measure with a rag and stirring different quantities of lurid powder in his mixing bowl amongst the beaten egg.
He started with an earthy, rich Burnt Ochre, adding Naples Yellow for its touch of summer afternoon then followed this with a restrained pinch of Rose Madder. Next the bloody and translucent drizzle of rich crimson was mixed vigorously with the combination, tiny beads of yolk frosted with colour crushed into each other by the stirring squirrel hairs. He supplemented the already-satisfying mixture with his secret touch, the trick he’d learned from Jackie Thimbles, which was to employ a sprinkling of Cobalt Blue, this simulating the depleted veinal blood that circulated just below the human epidermis. If the blue and reds should prove too much Ern would offset them with a drop of white, but for the moment he was pleased with how the blending had turned out and set about preparing his light skim of gesso, shaking the blanched gypsum from its bag into a little water and then pouring his flesh tempera to colour the thin plaster once it had been mixed. Taking a useful range of brushes in his trouser pocket Ernest walked across the aerial theatre’s boards, holding his bowl containing the painstakingly assembled medium between both hands, back to the platform’s southwest point where he commenced to work on the gigantic countenance, his head tipped back as he reached upward slightly to the image on the concave wall directly over him.