On Tuesday, at dusk, the eagles flew from the Coroner’s Court. Unfurling their wings of stone, they launched themselves into the deep blue beyond. Commuters, impatiently awaiting their buses, did not believe their eyes.
On Wednesday it was the turn of the women. One calmly led a lion, against whose back she had reclined for the past century, out over the railings onto the roof, coaxing it as one might a reluctant cat. They disappeared from sight, though not from memory.
Nearer to ground, a woman armed with a sword – who had sat peaceably enough above the Court’s main entrance, suddenly dropped her sword to the ground beneath. It clanged. Positioning herself carefully, she leapt to earth, cushioning her fall by rolling as fluidly and proficiently as any martial arts expert. She reclaimed her weapon and bystanders remarked that, animated, her expression bore a feral cast entirely removed from the placid countenance she had worn in her years of stillness. Rising to her feet, she smiled, baring her teeth at passers-by. She strode purposefully and smoothly into the city’s heart, her sword held low and dangerous against the drapery of her full long skirts.
The gargoyles disappeared on a bleak and rainy Thursday. Wolf-headed, ram-horned, gratuitously grotesque, they had spouted water from the roofs of rainy Manchester’s churches and cathedrals through Blitz and Bombs, but now they were gone to ground.
How did I know all this? Passers-by brought me the news as swiftly and surely as any official briefing or bowing courtier. And with my own two unyielding eyes I had seen a bare-breasted woman lead a lion through Piccadilly Gardens at four in the morning. They took the Oldham road.
On Friday the angels took to the air as one. From monuments and spires they rose and those who heard their song fell silent and for ever after sought to call to mind the memory of their singing. I saw them, wheeling overhead, circling higher, their song ever more distant.
All that time, from Wednesday to Friday, I sat, considering and deliberating, for I am perhaps less inclined to act precipitately than was my flesh-and-blood namesake. For if my crown weighed heavy in life, so much more so has it been a burden in my years of thought and stillness since. And I, alas, am no lithe sword-maiden. Nor do lions follow at my command.
But on Saturday, I could wait no longer. Early in the morning, before the shops opened – though truth be told the city was emptier than usual these past few days – I rose to my feet and considered how best to descend from my high and stony seat. A matter that required some thought for my figure is matronly not maidenly. Gracelessly – without visible witnesses at least – I clambered down at last, biting back curses at my cumbersome clothes. Then, to cancel out the indignity of my descent, I stood straight and formal before that high throne from which I had watched the years pass by. I took off my crown and left it there on the empty seat.
Then – as I had always known I would, despite all of my hard considerations and deliberations – I turned my back on Manchester and took the road to the South.
Even stupefied and subdued as it was by recent events, the world I now walked through was louder and noisier than that which had been known to my fleshly self. The skies, for once were silent – no contrails criss-crossed the sky. For though the angels had circled ever upwards and their song was now unheard on earth’s surface, what mortal pilot would risk such a collision?
Yet the great lorries continued in rumbling convoys unceasing, lest the cities starve, collapsing inwards on the weight of human need. The truckers pretended not to see me as I walked by the side of the road. Eventually, just South of Stoke and weary of the noise and fumes, I left the M6 for smaller, less frequented roads. Requiring neither food nor sleep, I walked for days, ceaselessly under rain and sun alike.
In a field just out of Oxford, I came across a group of soldiers. They had dug trenches with their stony hands, deep enough to hide themselves in. Unchallenged, they had torn down the barbed wire fences that had kept the sheep from straying and strung them along their battlements, all twisted and snarled. The shadows stood sharply on the ground. They sat together, some fossicking in kit bags, others cleaning bayonets. A cigarette dangled from the mouth of one man but it was unlit. They waited and watched, gas masks kept close to hand. A stout middle-aged woman – even stony of heart and face as me – posed little threat and offered little interest. And so I passed them by unhindered, disregarded.
In these strange days of flesh and stone, we act as though we cannot see each other, as though pretence might serve as a defence.
From Oxford I took the River Isis East to Abingdon and beyond. I followed it all the way into London, which like a large and greedy pike, has gobbled up all of the surrounding towns. Past Richmond, Hampton Court and Kew, past derelict Battersea Power Station. I came at last to Westminster Bridge. Pushing my way through the throngs of tourists, I did not pause to look at the Houses of Parliament or visit Westminster Abbey. I went on to Trafalgar Square, where Nelson no longer surveys the City from his column.
Where has he gone, I wonder? Seeking another kiss from his Hardy? Down to the sea?
I do not know. Nor do I wish to seek him out.
I came at last to Hyde park, to the object of my long journey from the North.
There, stretching out before me, I saw an amusement of Victorias, all assembled. A swelling sea of young idealised Victorias, old and stern Victorias, middle-aged Victorias like me, all of greater or lesser verisimilitude. All resplendent, all triumphal. And there, standing in our midst a bemused Albert, haplessly clutching his programme for the 1851 Exhibition. For ever since that first Wednesday when it was the turn of the women, Victorias had been congregating here. Those closest arrived first – others, stragglers from the North and from Scotland were still arriving.
Oh, but it was good to look on his face again. To see his smile. I had known of course, how it would be – what use is deliberating and considering from Wednesday to Friday unless it shows you some small shadow of the future? I had no doubt that within a month every Victoria in the land would be gathered here. And yet. I circulated through that crowd, in a slowly decaying orbit that centred on him.
He moved slowly, talking first to a beautiful young Victoria, then to an elderly dowager Victoria. His expressions, his attitude a stone simulacrum of the Albert I – we–remembered. So familiar, so long unseen.
And yet. Seeing him so unscathed, I found that I myself have changed in ways that I had not anticipated in all of my deliberations and considerations. For I have put down the crown and passed anonymously by the Queen’s soldiers – and if in so doing they are no longer bound to me, so too I am no longer bound to them. And watching my old lost love, there in that Victorian park, as I moved slowly to the margins of that crowned crowd and left, I found myself filled with new longings, for the hills where I was quarried, for rivers and roadsides. And the memory of angel song.
