The Choir

by Joanna Trollope

  At three o’clock, Alexander Troy took some of the younger boys for ancient history. That way, he got to know each boy in the school. A lot of them, he thought, looked extremely tired, almost strained, which was wrong for nine-year-olds on a summer afternoon who had only played cricket since lunch. They were doing the Peloponnesian Wars. Nobody was concentrating well. After a while, Alexander gave up and read them an extract from Mary Renault’s The Last of the Wine, and three out of seventeen went gently to sleep on their desks. When the bell rang he had an impulse to say, “Sorry I’m not much fun today,” but there was no need; they had a childish acceptance of authority, good or bad, and would not think to judge him.

  Sandra met him in the corridor outside.

  “Mrs. Troy rang.”

  “What, now? Is she on the telephone now?”

  “No. She wouldn’t let me fetch you. She said to tell you she was very well but that she must be alone for a while.”

  “Sandra. Sandra, why didn’t you fetch me?”

  “Mrs. Troy said not to.”

  “Haven’t you the wit to see when it is right to disobey?”

  Sandra opened her mouth to say that Mrs. Troy would only have hung up if she had left the telephone to fetch the headmaster, but shut it again. He looked so utterly wretched.

  “Was that all she said?”

  “Only that she probably wouldn’t stay in London.”

  “Where is she in London?”

  Sandra said falteringly, “She didn’t say.”

  “And you didn’t ask?”

  “No.”

  Sandra said timidly, “Remember when she went to Suffolk—and then when she went to the cottage at Picklescott. And when she saw Daniel off to America and stayed in London then—”

  Alexander was abruptly smitten by the unwanted, unbidden reflection that neither his wife nor his only child seemed to want to stay permanently near him. He said with an effort, “Mr. Beckford says we have a homeless old boy in our midst. I’d better see him. Do me good to see another victim of the arbitrariness of life.”

  “He’s gone to tea with the dean, Headmaster. I saw him going across the close a few minutes ago.”

  “I thought he was our piece of news.”

  “I expect the dean has only borrowed him.”

  Alexander looked down at her gratefully.

  “Fetch a bemused old clergyman a cup of tea, there’s a good girl. What a prop and stay you are.”

  “And who,” said Mrs. Monk, who ran the kitchen, looking at Sandra’s illuminated face a minute later, “ ’as been giving our Miss Miles red roses, then?”

  The dean opened the door of the deanery to Nicholas. Inside, in the stone-floored hall lit by a marvellous Venetian window on the graceful staircase, the Labrador waited, and a tall man in a purple cassock.

  “In your day,” Hugh Cavendish said to Nicholas, “Bishop Henry was here. Now it is Bishop Robert. Bishop, this is Nicholas Elliott, who was our head chorister ten years ago.”

  “I am glad you have come back,” the bishop said.

  Nicholas said, “Yes,” and felt feeble.

  “I was in Calcutta ten years ago, while you were singing here.”

  Nicholas nodded.

  “What has brought you back?”

  “Well—I—I ran out of money and I couldn’t think where else—”

  “We are going to give him tea,” the dean said encouragingly. “Ah.”

  Robert Young moved forward and took Nicholas’s hand.

  “Come and see me. You remember where the palace is.”

  “You are all being so kind.”

  “It is what we are here for.”

  Nicholas said suddenly, “I wish I hadn’t needed to come, you know, I wish I could have managed—”

  “When you have about three weeks to spare,” Bishop Robert said, “I will tell you a few things I can’t manage. Not managing is part of the human condition. And now I must return to the palace my poor wife can hardly manage.”

  When the door had closed behind him, the dean said, “We give him a chauffeur-gardener and he will hardly use him. We put two cleaning women into the palace and they have been sent to work at the council offices, which of course they are thrilled about because they get forty pence an hour more, and Janet Young does it all herself. If the palace garden wasn’t visible in part from the close, I don’t suppose he would use Cropper at all. And as for the House of Lords … Now, come in and have tea. We eat it in the kitchen.”

  The kitchen table bore the kind of tea Nicholas knew about only from old-fashioned stories set in prep schools. He wasn’t sure he had actually ever seen a plate of bread and butter before. Mrs. Cavendish, who was large and handsome and wore a print frock and pearls, was very gracious with him and told him that she had spent her girlhood in the bishop’s palace in Wells, just in case he mistook her for other than a member of the church’s aristocracy.

  “Dog collars all my life, you see.” She gave him a roguish glance. “Do you think I might break out one day? Have some plum jam. I made it myself. Is that the telephone?”

  “It is,” the dean said, “and it is bound to be for you.”

  As she left the kitchen by one door, another opened, and a black-clad boy with rusty spires of black hair slid in. He looked at Nicholas and said, “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “What,” said the dean in a voice of suppressed outrage, “have you done to your hair?”

  “Dyed it,” Cosmo said. “A packet from Boots. It’s Gothic.”

  “Gothic.”

  “Black is Gothic. So are these.” He lifted his feet and displayed pointed suede boots laced up round silver studs. “I’m a Goth now. See?”

  The dean seemed paralysed. Cosmo held out a thin hand smeared darkly with hair dye and smiled at Nicholas.

  “I’m Cosmo.”

  “I’m Nicholas—”

  “Go to your room.”

  “Jesus,” Cosmo said, “not again.”

  Bridget Cavendish came back from the hall saying, “It was Denman College. They want me to lecture on drying flowers again.” She saw Cosmo. “How simply disgusting you look.”

  He looked pleased.

  “I know.”

  “I have told him to go to his room.”

  “I’m a Goth, Ma.”

  “Don’t shout, Huffo. He can’t stay in his room until he is back to normal. Nicholas, you aren’t eating. Have some coffee cake. Women’s Institute. Frightfully good. Cosmo, go and wash.”

  Cosmo moved to the sink.

  “In the cloakroom.”

  “I’ll take Ganja, then. Come on,” he said to the dog. “Wash paws time. I say, he’s black. He’s a Goth too.” He turned to Nicholas with a smile as full of charm as his father’s. “Father calls him Benedict, after the saint, but I call him Ganja. Don’t I, Father?”

  When he had gone, Bridget said, “Cosmo is fourteen. I’m afraid his elder brother and sister egg him on a bit. Now, I want to hear all about you. Have some more cake?”

  When Nicholas left the deanery the sun was slipping down the west face of the cathedral and filling the panes of the great window with copper-coloured glass. He felt extremely full and equally disorientated. Everything was the same: the same interesting buildings formed their picturesque ring round the close; the same green grass flowed smoothly down from the cathedral on all sides, dotted with the same sorts of tourists reading the same old guidebook; and there in the southwest corner was the gap in the buildings where the Lyng began, the ancient highway that ran a steep mile from the cathedral to the estuary, lined with ancient lime trees and new green litter bins. The first of the bins was visible from the close. It said “Please Throw It HERE!” on the side. What a surprise and irrelevance it must be, Nicholas thought, to the ghosts of the medieval citizens of Aldminster toiling up the Lyng to their devotions; but then, medieval litter was biodegradable.

  He walked across the close to the top of the Lyng and looked down. The estuary gleamed down there
beyond the roofs and office blocks and industrial buildings, its sunset-glittering surface pierced with the bony silhouettes of cranes on the docks. He looked at it all critically. The city was pretty ugly really, redeemed only by the hills on which it was built. He never used to think it was ugly, but that was one of the penalties of growing older, that you stopped accepting things and started judging them. That was particularly true of people. That was why he didn’t think about his parents much, because the hero father had revealed himself to be callous and dull and the heroine mother to be an hysteric. He scuffed at the grass and noticed that one of the layers in the sole of his trainers was peeling away from the next one. So what. Here he was, twenty-three, penniless, without ambition or qualification, full of Women’s Institute coffee cake, and shortly to be walking barefoot. Nowhere to go but up. Or down, where there wasn’t even any cake. He was touched by the small glamour of his predicament. He turned away from the Lyng and, adopting the jaunty survivor’s air of a modern Huckleberry Finn, began to lope around the edge of the close, back towards the King’s School.

  “I’ve given you a poor welcome,” Alexander Troy said to him later.

  “That’s all right, sir.”

  “A parent has given me a bottle of whisky. I’m going to have some. Will you join me?”

  Nicholas said he would love to. They were in the headmaster’s sitting room, which Nicholas remembered for its three-piece suite covered in fawn cut moquette and a triangular fifties table whose legs ended in yellow plastic bobbles. Now the room looked like the cover of a Laura Ashley catalogue, a rustic, cluttered realization of the Anglo-Saxon idyll, where long sprigged curtains crumpled on to the polished boards of the floor and every corner contained an object of battered charm. Alexander scooped a cat out of a wicker chair draped in a faded patchwork quilt.

  “Sit there. It’s more comfortable than it looks. We are so lucky to have this house.”

  “I remember the guidebook saying it was the best in the close.”

  “It probably is. The plasterwork on the stairs is perfect. You must come and see—the intertwined initials and emblems of the couple the house was put up for in about 1680. Do you like water in this?”

  “Please …”

  Alexander passed him a tumbler and sat down opposite in a large chair he immediately dwarfed.

  “My secretary tells me that you have been rather handed about today like the prize in pass-the-parcel.”

  “The dean gave me tea. The bishop was there when I arrived.”

  “A lovely man,” Alexander said.

  “He didn’t seem a bit stuffy.”

  “Doesn’t know the meaning of the word. Did Sandra tell me you were head chorister once?”

  “Yes,” Nicholas said, and tears pricked his eyelids. “Yes, I was.”

  “My dear fellow—”

  Nicholas said desperately, “Everyone is being so kind—”

  “Yes. They would be. Very difficult for you, though. Being grateful is exhausting work. Have you kept up your music?”

  Nicholas shook his head.

  “Don’t you miss it?”

  “I forgot about it. Then I went into the cathedral and heard them singing some Palestrina this morning and I could remember every note and I missed it so much I nearly fainted.” He stopped and then said abruptly, “Sorry.”

  Alexander looked longingly towards the piano.

  “Would you sing a bit for me now? A bit of Bach perhaps? I’d like to play—”

  “Do you mind, sir, if I don’t. Not right now.”

  “I was thinking of ‘Now Let Thy Gracious Spirit.’ ”

  “I’d have to try it to myself again in the bath first,” Nicholas said in a tone of deliberate lightness, observing the headmaster’s sudden dejection of face and spirit. “Then I’ll have a go. Mr. Beckford said you were very interested in music.”

  “I read music at Cambridge. Then I went to theological college in Wells and now, after various false starts, here I am, most logically. Mr. Beckford is an outstanding organist and much too modest.”

  “I wished I was back in the choir, this morning,” Nicholas said. “I wished it.”

  “Because it was safe?”

  “Because when you do it, your life is quite taken up by it, and other people think you are right to do it, because of the music.”

  Alexander got up and poured more whisky into both their tumblers.

  “It’s the professionalism, isn’t it? Nobody ever questions that. And of course, sacred music always seems to me such a perfect outlet for boys, platonic, unphysical, unalarming yet richly satisfying because it is something they can do so wonderfully.”

  Nicholas drooped over his tumbler.

  “It’s the only thing I’ve ever been able to do.”

  Alexander surveyed his own weariness for a moment and decided he had not the energy to take on the intimacy of his guest’s misery just now. He said instead, “Would you think I was overdoing it if I told you that I believe the choir to be the soul of the cathedral?”

  Nicholas looked awkward and said he didn’t know. Alexander got up.

  “Don’t worry. I’m not about to catechize you and ask you about the relevance of God to today. But you ask the boys what they think about music and the cathedral. And God, for that matter. Ask an outstanding probationer we have, Henry Ashworth, one of the most promising voices I’ve heard in years coupled with one of the most straightforward personalities.”

  With his head bowed Nicholas said in a mutter that he supposed people only believed in God because they were afraid not to, but he supposed music must be a help, he wasn’t sure, really, but it was sort of comforting, wasn’t it …

  Poor fellow, Alexander thought, looking down on him, poor lost fellow. He put a hand under one of Nicholas’s arms.

  “Time matron was tucking you up and ticking you off. Have you got something to read?”

  Nicholas stared at him in despair.

  “I don’t read much—”

  “Here. Have Private Eye.”

  “I’m sorry,” Nicholas said. “I’m sorry—”

  “What for?”

  “Oh, turning up like this, being so hopeless, refusing to sing, not reading, being so wet—”

  Alexander put a hand briefly on his shoulder.

  “Actually, you’re rather a comfort to me. And I’m sure your state is only temporary.”

  “Thank you, sir. Good night, then, and thanks for the whisky.”

  When he had gone, Alexander went to the piano and played some of the Bach chorale that had been singing in his head for an hour. Then he got up and found a sheet of paper in the waxed elm desk Felicity had unearthed in a junk shop and restored herself, and on the paper he wrote:

  My most dear Felicity,

  Three things in life keep me going: God, music and you. Luckily, two of those things do not seem to fail me, but you may imagine that when you withdraw I can only go along but limpingly.

  Always and entirely yours,

  Alexander

  Then he tore the paper into tiny fragments, dropped the pieces into the empty grate, and took a third and unwise glass of whisky to bed with him.

  2

  “THE ASSAULT COURSE WAS FANTASTIC,” HENRY ASHWORTH WAS saying to his mother, “and then we were nearly late for evensong because we lost Hooper and there was only two minutes to get robed up so we just rushed in in our wellies and nobody noticed till afterwards when the dean saw and he said ‘WELLIES!’ in an outrageous voice so it was worth it.”

  “Outraged,” said Sally Ashworth absently because she was reading a letter. It was from Henry’s father in Saudi Arabia, where he was on a two-year contract helping with the technical installation in a new hospital outside Jeddah, and it smacked of untruthfulness, as all Alan’s letters now did to Sally.

  “So my gown’s muddy,” Henry said. “Can I have a choc bic?”

  Sally pushed the tin across the pine table. There was a lurking boastfulness in Alan’s letter. What was
it that impelled him to show off his conquests, however indirectly, to the one person he had no business to show them off to?

  “I got the top C in the Sanctus today,” Henry said, nibbling neat half-moons out of the rim of his biscuit, “bang on. The assault course was really amazing, my legs are nearly dropping off. Will you help me with my English?”

  Sally looked up at him with a gaze heavy with what preoccupied her.

  “Have you got a headache?”

  “Sort of,” she said.

  He put his biscuit down.

  “Shall I play?”

  “Yes. Oh, yes. Oh, Henry …”

  He slid off his chair and padded across the rush matting to the piano.

  “Choppers? A prelude?”

  “Lovely, anything …”

  He began to rummage through the music on top of the piano and said hurriedly, with his back turned to her, “I’m going to be a full chorister.”

  “Henry!”

  “Next month. It’s a special service, me and Chilworth. We get presented to the dean. Better not wear wellies then.”

  She put her hands on her hips and regarded him, beaming.

  “Henry.”

  He ducked his head.

  “I am so pleased. You can’t think. I knew you would be one day, but not so soon. You’ve only been a probationer half the time Chilworth has. Did you have to have another test?”

  “No, thank goodness. Mr. Beckford just said, ‘One test was quite enough, thank you.’ ” He struck an attitude. “ ‘Ashworth, sing A flat. Ashworth, sing A double flat. Write down this two-part tune, Ashworth, which I shall play only three times. Who, Ashworth, are the major composers of Tudor church music? And, Ashworth, what is sforzando—’ ”

  “Mr. Beckford doesn’t talk like that.”

  “He did ask me those things—”

  “What happened to my Chopin?”

  Henry brandished a thin book of music at her.

  “Do you want to know what he said to me today?”

  “Yes, actually.”

  “Well,” Henry said, settling himself on the piano stool, “I was chasing Wooldridge in the cloisters and out came Mr. Sims who is only chapter steward but thinks he is more important than the bishop and he said we were hooligans and Mr. Beckford came and said yes we were hooligans which was a pity for a man of gravitas like me who was going to be a full chorister. And Mr. Sims said he don’t deserve it sir and Mr. Beckford made us say sorry and then he said I’ve got to be measured for a surplice.”