The latch lifts under your hand with a sound that belongs to the door, a small iron click that travels up into the rafters and does not come back. Inside, the air is cooler than the lane was, and older, and smells faintly of beeswax and stone. You step onto the flagstones and the cold rises through the thin soles of your shoes. At the far end of the nave, above the lectern, a single oil-lamp is burning. Its flame leans, settles, leans again. The east window holds what is left of the day in long panels of faded red and faded blue, and the colour falls across the chancel floor in shapes that have already begun to move.
You walk slowly down the side aisle, keeping to the worn line in the stone. The pews are oak gone almost black, their edges rounded where shoulders and hands have rested for two hundred winters. A hymn board on the south wall still shows last Sunday's numbers in white card, the threes a little crooked. You pass a pillar with a brass plaque so polished by passing sleeves you cannot read the name on it without bending close, and you do not bend. The vergerwoman is at the third pew from the front, a stack of green hymn books in the crook of her arm. She slides them in one by one along the shelf, and the soft thump of each book is the only sound she makes. She does not look up. You do not need her to.
Somewhere above, in the bell loft or the roof beams, a wood-pigeon shifts its weight. There is a brief scrape of claw on timber, then nothing. The lamp gives off a small steady hiss, almost below hearing, the kind of sound you catch only when you stop trying to. From the tower comes the long slow tick of the clock mechanism, heavy as a spade turning earth, and after it the click of the escapement, and after that, again, the tick. You count three of them without meaning to and then stop counting. The vergerwoman moves to the next pew. The hymn books make their soft sound. Outside, very far off, a sheep calls once across a field, and a dog answers from a yard, and neither of them speaks again.
You sit down at the end of a pew halfway along. The wood receives you with the small creak old wood gives, and then is quiet. Your hand rests on the shelf where a hymn book would go, and your fingers find the grain there, the long lines of it running south, the grooves where generations of thumbs have opened to the same pages. The varnish is thin in places and gone in others. There is a knot in the wood under your palm, smooth as a river stone. You move your hand a little and find the cold round of a brass hook screwed into the underside of the shelf, meant for a hat, dark with age. The pew in front of you bears a kneeler embroidered in faded wools — a wheat sheaf, a lamb, a Latin word you do not try to read. The stitches are loose at one corner where a knee has rested too often in the same place.
The smell of the church settles around you in layers. There is the beeswax first, from the candles in the side chapel and from the cloth that has gone over the altar rail since Easter. Beneath that, the older smell of stone that has held damp through a hundred autumns and given it up slowly each spring. Beneath that again, the faint dry breath of hymn books, of paper that has been opened and closed in the same building for longer than anyone now living can remember. From the porch, when the door's draught lifts the curtain, comes a thread of woodsmoke from a cottage chimney across the green, and the green smell of yew from the churchyard, and the colder smell of the lane beyond, where the hedges are wet. The lamp adds its own thin smell of paraffin, almost sweet, almost not there.
The vergerwoman has reached the front pew. You hear her set the last of the books down on the seat for a moment while she straightens the kneelers, one, then another, then a third. Her shoes are flat and soft on the stone. She moves to the chancel step and pauses there, looking, as people look at rooms they have looked at for many years, and then she turns and goes up to the lectern and adjusts something at the base of the lamp. The flame steadies. She comes back down the centre aisle with the empty crook of her arm swinging a little, and you hear her pass behind you, and the small sound of the vestry door opening on its hinge, and closing, and a key turning, and then the door opening again and closing more softly. She is taking her time. There is no hurry in any part of her.
The light through the east window is going now. The reds have deepened to the colour of an old brick, and the blues have darkened almost to slate, and the figures in the glass — a robe, a hand raised, a lamb at someone's feet — are losing their edges. The shapes on the chancel floor have crept further east and grown longer and paler. You watch one panel of blue light slide by inches across a memorial slab set into the stone, a name worn almost smooth, a pair of dates you cannot make out. The light touches the lettering and moves on. Above, in the high clear panes at the top of the window, the sky is the colour of skimmed milk going grey. A single jackdaw crosses it and is gone before you have quite seen it.
A draught moves through the nave. It comes from somewhere under the south door, lifts the edge of a pamphlet on the table by the font, and travels along the floor towards you with a coolness you feel first at the ankles. The lamp flame bends, considers, returns. The candles in the side chapel — three of them in a wrought iron stand, lit earlier for some reason of someone's own — bend with it, and one goes out, and a thin curl of smoke rises straight up in the quiet that follows and then drifts sideways and disperses. The other two go on burning. From the tower the clock gives its slow tick, and its slow click, and its slow tick. The pigeon in the rafters resettles. A mouse, or the idea of a mouse, makes a small sound behind the wainscoting near the organ and does not make another.
You hear the vergerwoman coming back down the aisle. She is carrying the brass snuffer on its long pole, and she goes to the side chapel and puts out the two remaining candles one after the other, the small *tup* of the cup coming down over each flame, and the brief sigh of the wax giving up its heat. The smell of extinguished wick reaches you a moment later, that particular smell which is also the smell of the end of evensong, of weddings ending, of christenings ending, of any small gathering in this room ending. She carries the snuffer back to its hook by the vestry. She passes you again and this time, very slightly, she inclines her head, and you incline yours, and that is all of it.
The oil-lamp above the lectern is the last light now. The east window has gone almost dark, only the palest stain of blue still showing in the upper panes. The stone under your feet has taken your warmth and given you its cold in exchange, and your hands are folded in your lap, and the wood of the pew has stopped creaking beneath you. Outside, in the churchyard, the yews are gathering the dusk into themselves. Somewhere a gate closes on its latch. The lamp burns lower, and the shadows in the chancel lengthen, and the long slow tick from the tower goes on, and on, and the air around the flame thickens with the dark, and the colours in the window are almost gone now, almost gone, and the quiet settles deeper into the stone, and deeper still, and the flame leans, and the flame leans