Arco
“Southwell Minster really would be the most beautiful place to die.”
The resonating acoustics carry my voice to where she is sitting on a pew near the front of the church. Her delicate neck twists, her long shimmering hair moving with millisecond delay, her face disapproving.
“You shouldn’t say such things Oscar,” she admonishes, but her voice is far from harsh. Her voice could never be harsh – low and smooth, every decibel the contralto.
“Think about it – have you ever seen a more beautiful church?”
She shakes her head slowly, still seated. “I still wouldn’t think of it as the perfect place to die. Such a macabre thought!”
I pace forward, each step echoing back off high vaulted ceilings and lavishly decorated stone columns. “This is the first place I met you. I cannot think of anything more satisfactory than to leave this world the very place I first felt alive.”
I’ve drawn level with her pew and she stands slowly, stepping along the aisle to meet me. Her hair whispers from side to side with each movement, and I can almost hear the waves of sound it creates bouncing from off every surface within the church.
She shivers, caught in the cold – the price the church pays for acoustic perfection – and I gather her into my arms. She doesn’t move for long moments, only breathing shallowly.
This was where I’d first met her – and first heard her. What better place for a choir recital than Southwell Minster? Even with a hundred others to mispitch and stumble, her voice had still rung clear and piercing through every note of Faure’s Requiem, like an oboe tuning their orchestra. Dressed in her choir whites with her hair worn out and her low, harrowing voice, I could have sworn she was an angel. I could still swear, holding her like this, that if I were to die here and now she would simply reach out a hand, like she did at our first introduction, and lead me to heaven.
“Sylvia,” she’d said simply, all those months ago, on that watery Easter night – offering a hand like a siren to a drowning sailor. I’d barely managed to splutter out my name, let alone hold an intelligent conversation – I’ve still no idea why she ever spoke to me again.
And here I am, holding her. It would almost be the perfect moment to die.
With a sigh, she shifts her head to look up at me.
“We should start. The Reverend said I could only practise until eight. Where have you been?”
I am halfway through an excuse when she cuts my mental train short.
“No matter – I left your cello by the pulpit.”
My cello. My Sylvia. Both so alike. We both meet in the church, to practise and perform and convince people of emotions which we have never felt, but a composer wrote so truly of. I tune each string to the crystal sound of Sylvia’s voice, her perfect pitch resonating through each arch and pillar. The very air seems to hum in harmony – and this is only tuning. When she and the cello perform, it send shivers down the strongest spine and makes you feel like the music is alive, and you could pluck each note from the air to take home for a loved one.
Sylvia. Perfection. I always knew she was.
It’s sad to think that, even though she is perfect, her voice is never truly appreciated. “You’re a woman,” she mimicked them once for me, “and your voice is too deep. You can be replaced by a tenor. Contraltos have no use.”
Those people could never appreciate her as I can.
She must have caught me staring at her with fierce intensity, because suddenly she cleared her throat, shivered and spoke.
“The Dies Irae?”
I nod, find the music, and play.
Dies irae, dies illa solvet saeclum in favilla: teste David cum Sibylla
With each arco sweep of the bow the cello emits a new quality of sound – some piercing, some rich and deep, other still slow and lethargic, only to accompany Sylvia’s crystal voice.
Quantus tremor est futurus, quando judex est venturus, cuncta stricte discussurus!
The cello and Sylvia in perfect harmony, fighting the encroaching shadows which pervade into the church. Both low, harrowing, sweeping, perfect – for if Sylvia was not, at that moment, an angel, then no man has even loved and never truly died!
Tuba mirum spargens sonum per sepulcra regionum, coget omnes ante thronum.
The music increases in intensity, Sylvia’s voice growing darker, deeper and more grating – I respond my increasing the pressure of each stroke, throwing precision aside for raw musical fervour– Sylvia and the cello, the cello and Sylvia, never to be parted once more, always to work in harmony until the Dies Irae, the Day of Wrath and Judgement, when all shall burn –
Mors stupebit et natura, cum resurget creatura, judicanti responsura-
CRASH!
Sylvia’s head flicks, the beautiful hair along with it, as I throw aside the cello, letting it crack and
splinter against the cold stone floor, and dive at her, bow still in hand. Suddenly I am upon her and, without a pause or hesitation, taken only in the music and the raw energy of the moment, with one fluid arco sweep across her neck…
Sylvia collapses onto the cold stone floor, what little is left of her. No more can her hair whisper softly in the echoing church – now it will sing.
I leave her there, bald and silent, carefully collecting the cello, the soft gold locks already entwined into their new home. Tomorrow and forever she shall sing once more with the cello, and every day, with the hair she once wore so beautifully scraping in a slow, acro tune against the strings.
Southwell Minster really would be the most beautiful place to die.
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