Look To

by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Kenncombe, Devon. October.

---

Walter Hosegood had raised the treble before she got there, so when Tamsin came up the last turn of the stair the bell was already standing. It was mouth up in the dark above the ceiling, resting against its stay, and its rope hung quite still through the boss in the plaster. The red, white and blue of the sally were about level with her eyes.

"Coat off," Walter said. "You'll sweat."

He said everything loudly, like a man calling across a yard. He had worked forty-one years at the quarry above Sourton. They had blasted twice a day there, and in the end the blasting had taken his hearing. He had two hearing aids, which he kept in a tobacco tin in his jacket pocket, and he never wore them in the tower. The bells came through them, he said, like being hit with a shovel.

She hung her coat on the nail by the peal boards. The boards were black, with gold lettering: 5040 Grandsire Doubles, 1923, a list of names she knew from the graveyard, and the time, 2 hrs 51 mins. The ringing chamber smelt of dust, rope and the paraffin heater, which hadn't been lit yet.

"Hands," Walter said.

She took the tail end, the doubled-back end of the rope below the sally, and held it with her left hand over her right, the way he had shown her in July. He stood close behind her and a little to one side, so that he could reach the sally above her head. She could smell his jacket. It was wool that had been rained on too often.

"Going," he said, and pulled off.

The sally went up out of his hands into the ceiling, and the tail end rose up to meet her. Overhead the bell had gone all the way round, and the clapper had struck. She heard it in her teeth more than her ears. She pulled. The rope went up through her hands and kept going up, the tail end flying above her head, and the sally came down again into Walter's hands. Then, at the top of each stroke, everything stopped for a moment, the bell balanced on its mouth, before it came back.

They did it forty times. Backstroke was hers and handstroke was his. She had been doing backstrokes since July, and they were all right now. She had stopped thinking about them sometime in August without noticing that she had stopped. It was the handstroke she couldn't get. When Walter let her take the sally she went for it as if it were trying to get away from her. She grabbed it too high and too soon, with her eyes on it, and the bell dragged and was late, and the rope came back to her crooked.

"Don't look at it," he said. "It comes to you."

"I kn—" she said, and stopped. The n had closed in her throat, as it did, like a door against a draught. She stood with her mouth slightly open and the word behind it. Usually somebody finished it for her at that point. Her mother did, and Mr Tozer did, and so did half her class at school, kindly, the way you'd pick up something a person had dropped.

Walter wasn't looking at her mouth. He was looking at her hands on the tail end. Her hands were doing what they should, so he said nothing, and after a moment the n opened and she said "know" to nobody. The bell went round.

---

There was a thing he did, which she hadn't noticed for a while, and once she noticed it she couldn't stop noticing. He would ring the handstroke with his hands closed round hers on the sally, his fingers loose, the wrists not working. On the next handstroke his hands would only be resting on hers, and she couldn't have said whose pull it was. Then, some time after that, his hands were back by his sides. She had rung three handstrokes on her own before she felt the space where they had been.

At first she thought he was letting go of the rope. Then she understood that he never really held it. He held her hands, and she held the rope.

His hands were as broad as hymn books. The quarry had taken the tips off two fingers of the left one, and the skin of his palms was as hard and yellow as candle wax. She had expected hands like that to grip. They didn't. They hung open round hers like a hammock somebody has just got out of, and the rope moved through them without catching.

"There," he said. "That's the bell telling you, not me."

What the bell told her was very small. It came as a slackening at the top of the stroke, a moment when the rope weighed nothing, and if her hands were there for it she could take hold of that moment rather than the rope. The sally fell into her palms instead of her palms going up to it. Two in a row. Then she thought two in a row, and the third one she grabbed.

Walter laughed, a short bark. "Thinking," he said. I can see you do it."

---

The band came up at half past seven. They came in the order they always came, and she could have rung them in that order. Mrs Lethbridge came first, the tower secretary, who rang the second and kept the attendance book, and she lit the heater with her coat still on. Derek Tozer, who rang the fourth, carried the key to the clock room on a loop of baler twine. The Ellacott twins rang third and fifth. They were seventeen and enormous and moved around the circle of ropes like cattle round a gate.

Walter went round raising the others. Tamsin stood her bell and watched him take the tenor up. It was twelve hundredweight, and he raised it on his own. He swung it short and then a little higher and then higher again, until the strike came round to the place he wanted, and he caught it at the balance as easily as you would catch a door closing. He never looked up. He was watching the rope where it came down out of the ceiling. He told her once that he felt the bell come up through the floorboards, through the soles of his boots. The tower moved when the tenor was up and swinging, and he said he could feel it lean.

"Treble's ringing tonight," he said, "in rounds."

Mrs Lethbridge looked at Tamsin and then at Walter. "Walter, she's only..."

"She'll ring the treble," Walter said. He didn't hear the end of the sentence, or chose not to. "And she'll call it."

In rounds the treble rang first and started everything off. Whoever rang it called Look to and then Treble's going and then She's gone, and on gone she pulled off and the others followed her one after another, down the circle to the tenor. Tamsin knew the words. She knew them the way you know a staircase in your own house. She could also feel already where in the words she would get stuck.

"I can c—" she said to Walter. "C—"

Derek Tozer said, "Course she can call it," warmly, from the fourth, before she had got to the end of her own word.

Walter was looking at her hands again. They were on the sally, the bell at the balance above her, the rope tight between her palms and the ceiling. "You're all right," he said, and went to the tenor.

---

They stood in a ring around the room, each by their rope. The paraffin heater ticked as it warmed. Through the louvres up in the bell chamber came the sound of a car going down to the main road, then nothing.

The rope was tight in her hands. Up above, the treble was standing mouth up, leaning very slightly against its stay. She could feel the lean, all the way down the rope. It was not a weight so much as a readiness. The bell was waiting to go and she was holding it back.

At school, when it was her turn to read aloud, she had a way of getting round the words that stuck. She would swap little for small, or last for final, and run on before the block could close on her. Teachers wrote reads fluently on her reports. Nobody knew what she had gone round to get there. But Look to had no other words. It was what the treble said and what the treble had always said; it was written on no peal board, and every ringer in Devon knew it. There was no way round it.

She opened her mouth to say Look to.

The L was there. Her tongue was against the ridge behind her teeth, where L begins, and it stayed there. Her throat had closed under it, and the word wouldn't come. She could feel the shape of the whole call in her mouth, look to, treble's going, she's gone, and none of it would move. Her face grew hot. She knew without looking that the Ellacott twins were looking at their boots, as they did when it happened at school, which was kind of them. She knew Mrs Lethbridge had her lips pressed together, and that Mr Tozer was leaning forward to say it for her. She could feel his leaning across the circle.

Walter wasn't leaning. He was standing at the tenor with the sally in both hands, the way he stood at every practice, and he was looking at her rope. He had no idea that anything was wrong. Nothing was wrong with the rope.

The bell was still leaning. Her hands were full of it.

She didn't say anything. She pulled.

The treble came off the stay and spoke. A moment later the second came in behind it, because Mrs Lethbridge had been watching the rope too, without knowing she was. Then the third and the fourth, and the fifth, and the tenor last and lowest. Walter brought it in as if it had been called for. As far as he knew, it had.

---

The rounds were rough at first. Her handstroke wandered. Twice she grabbed, and the treble struck too close behind the tenor, and the two bells clashed in the dark over her head. She looked at her sally to see what was wrong with it.

"Don't look at it," Walter said across the circle, loud enough to cut through six bells. He didn't need to hear the clash. He could see her eyes.

So she looked at his rope. It was the only thing left to look at, and in rounds the treble follows the tenor. She watched the tenor sally go up out of Walter's hands. She watched it come down, watched his hands open for it a little before it came, and she found that her hands had opened. She hadn't told them to. His sally fell, and hers fell a breath after it, and she caught it.

She did it again, and again. The clashing stopped. The six bells began to come round with an even gap between each strike, each one falling into the space left for it. Under her feet the floorboards took on the rhythm, as they did when the ringing was good. She felt the tower lean and come back, very slightly, like somebody breathing in their sleep.

Somewhere about the twentieth round she wanted to laugh. Walter's eyes were on the fifth rope, and his boots were planted on the boards. He couldn't hear a note of it. She was ringing behind a deaf man, the bells were coming round evenly, and Mrs Lethbridge was smiling at nothing.

She stopped thinking it. Her hands went up for the sally and the sally was there.

Across the circle Walter lifted his chin at her. His lips moved: Call it.

---

To bring rounds to a stand somebody calls Stand next. Then on the next handstroke everyone checks their pull, the bell comes up to the balance and doesn't go over, and the ringing stops. The call has to go in a particular place. You say it as you pull a handstroke, so that the others have the backstroke to take it in. Say it late and they pull straight through it.

She didn't decide when. The sally came down into her hands, and she pulled, and the air went out of her in the pull, the way it does when you lift something heavy. The words were in that breath.

"Stand next."

It came out whole, on the beat, with no door in it anywhere. It came out between the treble and the second as though it were the sound of another bell.

Then backstroke, and then handstroke, and she checked. The treble swung up and slowed and slowed and stopped, and leant against its stay, mouth up in the dark. Behind it the others came up one at a time, second, third, fourth, fifth. Then Walter's tenor came up last, softly, without a bump. He had seen her check. He hadn't heard a word.

Without the bells the room seemed bigger. She could hear the heater ticking, and one of the twins breathing hard. Her own rope was still tight, the treble hanging over her at the balance. She stood with her hands on the sally and held the whole weight of it on nothing, as Walter had told her she would one day, and found that she wasn't holding it at all.

Mrs Lethbridge let her breath out. "Well," she said. "Who called that?"

The twins looked at Tamsin. Mr Tozer opened his mouth.

Walter Hosegood hadn't heard the question. He saw them all looking, though, and he saw where they were looking. "She did," he said, and bent to coil up his tail end.

---

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quīntum Nōnās Octōbrēs (3 October 2026), ā Mauritiō Merleau-Pontiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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