Stone Virgin by Barry Unsworth Page A

feverish intensity of it. Blood fluxed in his loins. He felt himself distending. He said desperately, ‘We shall need good pressure for the spraying.’
    ‘Well, you won’t get it,’ the other assistant said, with a slight snap of the lips. She seemed cross about something.
    ‘Yes,’ Barfield said, widening his visionary eyes. ‘Not one word of a lie do I tell. Just getting them off the wall has been the problem so far.’
    ‘Apart from anything else,’ Owen said, ‘the sacristan kept getting in the way, didn’t he, Gerald?’
    ‘And his language,’ Miss Greenaway said. ‘Considering we were in church. I know enough Italian for that. Oh, he was cursing us all right.’
    They were firm enough, there was no sag, but that softly mounded effect argued against an integument of any kind, however gossamer thin, as did the way in which the nipples, perfect and palpable, pricked against the cotton of the T-shirt … With a dangerous plunge of appetite Raikes found himself wondering how much of one of Miss Greenaway’s naked breasts he would be able to cram into his mouth. He felt constricted inside his trousers. Whose cannibal heat was this? Three other men at this table, he thought …
    It was Miss Greenaway herself who restored him, with her reference to papers. ‘Of course he was annoyed,’ she said, ‘because he had that clearing out to do. They promised to clear the place completely but there were still these two old cupboards in there full of odds and ends, files and so on.’
    ‘We need the space, you see,’ Owen said. ‘We can’t have bloody great cupboards in the way.’
    ‘Files?’ Raikes felt his agitated blood subside.
    ‘The smallest of the canvases is seven metres long, you know, isn’t it, Gerald?’
    ‘Seven point three,’ Barfield said.
    ‘Not as much as that surely,’ the other assistant said.
    ‘What did he do with them, with the stuff in the cupboard?’ Raikes said quietly to Owen, who was sitting next to him.
    ‘Carted it all off. What annoyed him, you see, was that he had to empty the cupboards before he could move them. He took it all through into the sacristy.’
    ‘They weigh half a ton each,’ Barfield said. ‘What am I saying? The Murder of Abel on its own weighs thirteen hundredweight.’
    ‘They’ll be a good bit lighter when we get the old lining off.’
    ‘Getting them off the stretchers is going to be the real sweat.’
    The Tintoretto people had reverted to their group identity, talking among themselves, sipping eagerly at their coffee as they did so – except for Miss Greenaway, he noted, who was having a separate low-voiced conversation with Steadman. He heard her utter again that brief, rather barking laugh.
    There might just be something there. The chapterhouse had been disused for ages, certainly for most of the century. Or even longer. A convenient dumping ground. Very damp though, some of the windows had no glass in them. Still, if the cupboards were reasonably airtight …
    ‘No, it’s a good six metres,’ he heard Owen say. ‘I’m talking about the Sacrifice of Isaac.’
    ‘So am I,’ Barfield said. ‘It is five point six five.’
    ‘You’re wrong there, Gerald.’
    ‘I have always thought it pointless’, Raikes said, ‘to argue about things that can easily be verified.’
    It was the sort of self-righteous remark that made him disliked. A certain resentful hush fell over the table. Raikes got to his feet. He had not really intended the words as a rebuke. ‘I’ll be on my way,’ he said. It would be a good time to investigate the sacristy. But regret at having offended the Tintoretto people made him linger. Fatally, he sought to make amends by expounding further. ‘All this measuring is a curse,’ he said. ‘It was Ruskin who began it, creeping about. Everyone says what a breakthrough, but I don’t think so at all. His slide-rule wasn’t much use to Effie, was it?’
    His own incoherence, and the total failure of his joke – none of