Witness account · 4 min read · Set in Saint-Verel ·
The Choir That Left the Pew
During the Sunday service at Saint Verel's a choir boy sings the descant on the wrong side of the altar, and the congregation sits through the rest of the hymn without anybody turning round to see who is singing.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: Maureen Pike, sidesperson
I have been a sidesperson at Saint Verel's for fourteen years, and my job is to hand out the books, show the late comers to a pew, and keep an eye on the children at the back. I do not sing. I have never had the voice for it. But I have heard the choir every Sunday since the year I started, and I know its sound the way I know the sound of my own kettle.
On the second Sunday of Advent the choir was short. Only six of the usual twelve had come, because the bus from Ostmark had been cancelled and the Harrow sisters were both down with colds. Mr Dyer, the organist, had asked me to sit in the front bench with the music sheets just in case the boys needed a hand with the descant.
We began the hymn at the usual speed. The congregation came in on the first verse. The choir came in on the second, thin but true, the altos holding the line and the basses steady underneath. I was watching the boys in their surplices by the altar rail, counting the breaths, when the descant started.
It came from the wrong side of the church.
I am certain of this. I turned my head at once and looked at the north aisle, the pillars and the old memorial window, and there was nobody there. The sound was a clear treble line, high and sweet, following the melody a fraction behind the choir, a perfect counterpoint, exactly the descant that Mr Dyer had written out in pencil for the Advent setting. The boy who should have been singing it, young Sam Quill, was standing at the altar rail with his mouth shut tight and his eyes wide, looking at the north aisle himself.
I saw the congregation glance up. Then, quite deliberately, they looked back down at their books.
Nobody turned round. I was sitting in the front pew with my head twisted back over my shoulder, and I could see the whole nave, and not one person in it turned to look for the singer. The Ostmark family in the fourth row kept their eyes on the hymn. Old Mrs Tennant at the back, who always stares at everything, kept her face forward. The vicar, at the chancel step, went on reading the words from his book in a slightly raised voice, as though he were the only one who could hear himself.
The descant went on through the verse and into the chorus, and the sound filled the church the way warm air fills a room when the heating comes on. People began to sing along with it. Quietly, not the whole congregation, but enough. They sang the words in the right places and held the notes, and the voices in the north aisle lifted to meet them, and for the length of that hymn Saint Verel's sounded better than I have ever heard it.
When the last amen died away, the descant stopped at the same moment as the choir, neither a beat early nor late. There was a short silence, the kind that comes after something has been properly finished. Then the congregation shuffled and coughed and opened their Bibles at the reading, and nobody mentioned the singing at all.
I went to see the vicar after the service. He said he had heard a descant, yes, a very fine one. He asked who had been singing it. I said I did not know. He said that was all right, because the choir had sung it together, and that sometimes a church just has more voices than the book allows for.
Mr Dyer, when I asked, went quite pale and said he had never written a descant for the north aisle in his life.
The following Sunday the choir was full. Sam Quill sang the descant from the altar rail, clear and bright and perfectly in tune. Nobody looked up at the north aisle during the hymn. But at the end, when the boys filed past the font in their surplices, I saw one of them, the smallest, stop and glance back over his shoulder toward the empty pillars, and smile, the way a child smiles at a friend in the crowd who has waved at him from far away.