‘Wha-at can I give him, poor as I am … ?’
They crept round to where a tiny chink of light appeared in the wall and they could peer through the gap.
There were choirboys in red and white soutanes, and older men singing in black. There was a smaller section of women to the side, dressed like waitresses in black skirts and white shirts. The men were definitely more glamorous, thought Carmen.
The choirmaster wore black spectacles and his hair was grey and curly. He was concentrating ferociously on a huge book in front of him on which lines of music notation were densely printed, and occasionally gesturing in one direction or another, or pointing at the pianist in the corner, or looking up for reasons Carmen didn’t quite understand.
As she was looking at everything, Oke, she noticed as her eyes adjusted, wasn’t doing any of this. He was standing, leaning against the wall, his eyes closed. He opened them when he realised she was watching him and, to Carmen’s surprise, brought a flask out of his backpack.
It was full of hot chocolate.
‘Don’t have too much,’ he whispered. ‘You might spill it or feel sick.’
She was so surprised, she grinned widely.
‘Wow,’ she whispered, dampening down a voice inside her that wondered if Dahlia had made it.
‘Ssh,’ he said. ‘I want to hear the music. And the conductor has bat hearing.’
They settled down on the opposite side of the passageway, widening the chink in the curtain imperceptibly so they could also see.
But you didn’t have to see really. The area was vast and round – and freezing – and the sound swelled up from the ground and filled the air and passageway and all the spaces in between.
Carmen didn’t normally go to concerts which weren’t pop concerts, and had always assumed they would be a bit boring. But when she heard the men’s voices swelling in the deep dark – the cry of good King Wenceslas’ ‘Mark my footsteps, good my page’ answering the page’s lament, ‘Sire, the night is darker now and the wind grows stronger’ – she felt the hairs on her arms go up.
The reason the conductor was looking skywards, she realised with a start that made Oke giggle, came at the climax of ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ when – BOOM – a huge pipe organ burst into melody, crashing from the heavens itself.
And finally, it was the last carol, and the voices went so, so quiet and pure Carmen had to strain to hear the ‘Scots Nativity’ – balloo, lamby, balloo, ballay – the gentle words mothers had crooned to babies for hundreds of years, each baby special, each one the promise of love renewed.
Tears unexpectedly ran down her cheeks, even as she saw the conductor glance at his watch, and the choristers lift up their cassocks to reveal trainers and odd socks and perfectly normal people beneath the otherworldly sound they made. It was odd to connect old, grey-haired men and small, chubby, freckled boys with the grandeur and the glory of everything they had just heard as they slipped away and the choirmaster droned on about not being late to rehearsals and would the altos stop chewing.
‘Oh my goodness,’ Carmen said, as the freezing air hit them back out on the street. ‘Goodness. That was lovely.’
She looked at him severely.
‘But it made me very happy and it wasn’t remotely useful. And it celebrated Christmas.’
Oke shrugged.
‘Perhaps a little worship is useful?’ he said.
Carmen’s face fell. Oh no. Was he some kind of Godbotherer, trying to recruit her?
‘I had you pegged as a scientist with a bit of cultural Quakering on the side,’ she grumbled.
‘I am,’ he said.