When Sandra came into Alexander Troy’s study to say that the dean was on the telephone, wanting to discuss a matter of some delicacy, Alexander’s reaction was irritated.
“Tell him that I am in a meeting and ask him to make an appointment.”
Sandra had an annoying regard for the strict truth.
“But you are not in a meeting. I’ve said you are free.”
“Then I am teaching.”
“But you are not!”
He said crossly, “This is an idiotic conversation.”
She drooped. There was no point in telling him that he had made it so.
“I’ll do what I can—”
“Oh,” he said in exasperation, “of course I’ll speak to him,” seizing the receiver on his desk. “Yes? Yes?”
Sandra went back to her office. Mrs. Troy had now been gone for ten days and there was no word from her beyond a postcard reproduction of a Turner from the Tate Gallery with, on the back, an indecipherable postmark and the words “Don’t worry.” Alexander was carrying that postcard about like some talisman and she had seen him poring over the postmark endlessly and fruitlessly. Perhaps she must try to regard it as a compliment that his temper was so short with her; he was never irritable with the boys, after all, and he must be allowed to let steam off somehow. But how strange it was, with a strangeness that was very fascinating, to see a clergyman as vulnerable as any other man in such a situation.
“They’re real people, you know,” Sandra would say to her friends. “Underneath they are. They just can’t show it.” And then confidentially, “It’s really hard on the wives, you know.”
Before she came to work at the King’s School, Sandra would not have believed that clergy wives behaved like other wives; surely clergy wives had a kind of moral elevation that rendered them immune from resentment, neglect, jealousy, or frustration? Did they not automatically and joyfully share in their husbands’ commitment to God and humanity? She had once suggested this diffidently to Felicity Troy in a rare moment of intimacy while mopping up a flooded washing machine together, and Felicity had said, “I think you should look at what you see, not at what you expect to see. Perhaps Victorian evangelizing missionary wives felt like that, but now—”
Sandra had started looking, and it had become compulsive viewing, this quiet observance of marriages round the close. Of all of them, perhaps the bishop and his wife came closest to her early preconception, but then, the Youngs were an essentially private couple, and who could guess what struggles went on in the palace behind those tall windows that Janet Young laboriously polished herself? They were as private as the Cavendishes were public—you only needed half an eye to see how managing Mrs. Cavendish was and how she thought her children so perfect she’d let them roam the streets looking like hippies, while she went off to London once a month, all Jaeger suits and pearls. But then, she had money. It made all the difference. Sandra knew that most of the wives of the diocesan clergy managed on about the same money as she earned as a secretary, and she lived at home and had a boyfriend who had old-fashioned ideas about her not paying for much, so her money wasn’t much more serious than pocket money. But clergy wives had to eat and dress and keep warm and bring up a family on that sort of money, and the parishes didn’t like it if they pleaded poverty; Sandra knew that at first hand because her mother’s parish out at Coombebrook had got very hoity-toity when the vicar had asked for help with logs and coal for the winter. No wonder most of the wives went out to work, and no wonder they then had so little time or energy left for parish work and thus couldn’t share in their husbands’ lives as once they might have done. Sandra had long conversations with her mother about this, which got them nowhere, really, because her mother was so very old-fashioned in her views.
She was, for instance, very stuffy about Felicity’s disappearing acts, as she called them, but Sandra knew better now, herself. She hated to see Alexander caused pain, but she knew that Felicity’s life was hard in a way that nobody who didn’t know it at first hand could possibly appreciate. If you weren’t very careful with each other, God actually could get in the way of a marriage, because it was clearly easier for some men to be more in love with the Church than with a woman. God had His impersonal side. He didn’t feel neglected or exploited or have headaches, and making Him the priority, always, had the world’s sanction. The world applauded you if you did wonderful parish work and was sorry for you if your wife was neurotic or busy or unsupportive; but what the world on the whole didn’t see was that the parish didn’t cost you one-hundredth part as much emotionally, however much you cared about it, and therefore to give your time to it instead of to a wife and family was, in essence, an escape.
Alexander came out of his study.
“The dean is coming in at six. Be a dear and fly for a bottle of fino sherry, would you? I’ve only got an inch of Mr. Cottrell’s whisky left and I’m sorry I was cross.”
Sandra said impulsively, “You mustn’t take Mrs. Troy’s going personally, you know. Because it isn’t. It’s to do with Aldminster and the close and the Church.” She blushed tremendously. “I’m sure I’d do the same if I was her.”
There was a pause, and then Alexander put a five-pound note down on Sandra’s desk.
“Funny you should say that. I often think I shouldn’t mind running away for a bit myself if I could. There’s the sherry money—sprint, will you, or the shops will shut and I’ll have to offer him Nescaéf.”
“I had a most peculiar visit this morning,” Hugh Cavendish said. “Rather caught me on the hop, I’m afraid. Frank Ashworth came and gave me a spiel about the close being unwelcoming to Aldminster citizens, and then said he wanted the council to be able to buy a property here to make some sort of social centre where people could feel at home. He didn’t, of course, beat about the bush. He said that this was the house he had his eye on.”
“This house!”
The dean had recovered himself since the morning.
“Naturally I made it very clear that it does not even begin, as a proposition.”
“Is he serious?”
“In essence, yes. I don’t think Frank Ashworth says anything idly, which is why I must report it to you, and to the next chapter meeting. I think he will pursue the idea and we must be armed. I’ve already thrown out the idea of the almshouses to him.”
Alexander got up and went to lean against the mantelpiece.
“I am absolutely appalled. Why does everything have to be downgraded, why is ‘excellence’ a dirty word, why are people allowed to behave precisely as they like and are even pandered to and provided with a beautiful setting to defile—”
“I think,” the dean said smoothly, “that Frank Ashworth is an old-fashioned socialist and believes in the essential goodness of humankind.”
“You don’t believe that!”
The dean said nothing.
“Have you come here,” Alexander said loudly, “to tell me that you intend to propose the selling of this house to the council at the next chapter meeting?”
“On the contrary. I have come to warn you of what Frank Ashworth has in mind and to discuss with you our tactics when he returns to the fray, which he surely will.”
“Is the council behind him?”
“If it isn’t now, it soon will be. We must present a united front. The canons won’t be a problem, I’m glad to say.”
“Is this house covered by the statutes?”
The dean said carefully, “I thought it was, but I fear I was wrong. There was a revision of cathedral property under Cromwell, but of course this house is just too young for inclusion in that.”
Alexander sat down again.
“It was good of you to come. I am, after all, the headmaster and must live where I am told.”
The dean leaned forward and said in a very different and solicitous voice, “My dear fellow, I can’t tell you how sorry I am—”
“The pressures build up, you know,” Alexander said hurriedly, desperate to pr
event his mentioning Felicity’s name, “you know how they do—”
“Indeed, indeed—”
“I’ll think about this proposal. Perhaps the almshouses really might—”
“If anyone should speak to you, perhaps you would say that the matter is under review by the dean and chapter?”
It dawned upon Alexander that the purpose of the dean’s visit had in truth been to condole with him over his vanished wife rather than to consult him over Frank Ashworth’s proposition, which, after all, he had no power to affect, one way or the other. He said rather heartily, in an attempt at gratitude, “At least we have the launch of the organ to look forward to.”
The sun rose in the dean’s countenance.
“That will be a great event. The tickets were completely sold out two weeks ago.”
He stood up and put a hand on Alexander’s shoulder.
“To tell you the truth, I see no point in selling this house. So rest assured. If the council have money to burn, they can erect some purpose-built leisure centre.” He paused. “And I will pray for good news for you.”
When he had gone, Alexander poured himself another glass of sherry and then walked the length of the house to the fearsome Victorian larder and put the bottle on an inconveniently high shelf so that he wouldn’t be tempted to have any more. Then he went back to his study for the few minutes that remained before the evening prayers he held once a week for the school, which were compulsory for the under-fourteens, voluntary for the seniors, and usually surprisingly well attended. He put this down not so much to godliness as to the boys’ instinctive recognition of the particular and mysterious atmosphere of evening worship; you could see by their faces how many of them were moved. If he needed to chastise a boy, an interview after compline was usually successful on both sides.
Felicity often said to him how enormously romantic she found men and boys to be. “Look at them,” she would say to him when the school was gathered before them. “They really believe in the possibility of their dreams. They really do.” She had sounded so yearning, almost envious. He knew she dreamed dreams and that the only outlet for the near-visionary outbursts of her imagination was these poems, worked over endlessly and painfully. He also knew of her immense womanly practicality, a realism that must sometimes have seemed to her an enemy to her poetic perception. And yet both were rooted in her, made her up, made her the elusive and adorable person she was and also, probably, drove her near to despair, drove her to run away as a physical release from a locked-together combat of mind and spirit. Perhaps—he turned the idea over gingerly in his mind—perhaps it nearly broke her up not to be able to believe consistently in her dreams and visions. He wished she would talk to him about it. He wished she would tell him what, if anything, about their way of life, or indeed him, she could not bear. She had always been self-contained, which had given her a graceful dignity that was one of the things that had drawn him to her at the outset, but as she got older, she had dug deeper into herself, and he had to resort to her poems to try to understand and they were often most obscure. She never reproached him; she always smiled and was loving but lightly loving, almost absentminded sometimes. It was alarming how much he missed her. Suppose that this time she did not come back, and suppose that the council compulsorily bought this lovely house and he was put into the empty flat at the top of the school’s main building, where he would grow to dread the holidays and doubtless take to the bottle?
He straightened himself abruptly. This would not do. He had always announced that next to hysteria, he abhorred self-pity in anyone. He would go upstairs and brush his teeth vigorously before he went down to compline because the boys so delighted in sniffing the air like hounds to detect, gleefully, the faintest breath of alcohol around any member of staff after six o’clock at night. “Glugging gin in cupboards,” Leo Beckford had once said, “the minute the clock strikes six. That’s what they think we do.”
Ianthe Cavendish, down from London for the weekend, made the taxi drop her at the top of the Lyng. That way, she could slip round the close of the deanery via the little sixteenth-century yard on the northern side, where the chapter office was and the cathedral works yard, and where, in a pair of lurching timbered houses, the organist and the assistant organist lived side by side. The assistant organist, Martin Chancellor, had a wife and a baby, and a basket of lobelias and striped pelargoniums hung outside his front door and his knocker was polished and there were three clean empty milk bottles in a special little crate on the step. The curtains were drawn, and no doubt behind them Martin and Cherry Chancellor—who both taught part-time in city schools—were marking books or watching BBC2 with the washing-up done and the baby asleep and breakfast already laid for the morning.
Leo’s curtains were not drawn, as Ianthe had known they wouldn’t be. In fact, there was only one curtain, as Leo had taken one down once to wrap up a friend’s fiddle for a journey to London and the curtain had never come home again. He had a centre light and four lamps and he was sitting at the piano with a score and a pencil, wearing a green T-shirt that said “Warwick University Ski Club” on the back, which was typical of Leo, since he had never been near either Warwick University or a ski slope in his life. The walls of the house rose straight up from the cobbles of Chapter Yard, so Ianthe could lean her elbows on Leo’s windowsill and gaze without hindrance. If she tapped on the glass, he’d be unlikely to notice—she had never in her life known anyone who concentrated as Leo did. In her best fantasies she imagined that intensity of concentration focused entirely on her; it would be like being consumed by a wonderful flame. She gazed at him, at his thick, rumpled hair and the knobs on his vertebrae through the T-shirt as he hunched over the keyboard, and his lovely narrow bottom on the piano stool and his really intelligent hands—she could only see the right one properly—moving knowledgeably over the keys. It was a real turn-on, standing watching him secretly like this. She’d think of it when she saw him come in to the cathedral on Saturday for this service to celebrate the restoration of the organ, and he’d be in his surplice and might even have brushed his hair, and only she would know about the private messy lovely Leo underneath.
She banged on the window. He didn’t hear, so she banged again, more loudly, and he turned around crossly and came to open the window and said, “Go away, Ianthe, I’m working.”
“How did you know it was me?”
“Because it’s Friday and I saw your mother today in Sainsbury’s.”
“Can I come in?”
“No.”
“Five minutes?”
“There’s this huge concert service tomorrow and a thousand last-minute things—”
“I’ll only stay a second, I promise. I’ve got some vodka.”
“You drink too much, you and Petra.”
Ianthe put her bottle down inside the room and attempted to heave herself over the sill.
“Use the door,” Leo said rudely, not helping her.
Breathlessly, she wriggled in, falling into the muddle of books and boxes on the floor.
“Five minutes,” Leo said, “and then I’m throwing you out.”
She beamed at him.
“It’s so lovely to see you.”
“I’m in a horrid mood and I don’t want to see anyone.”
She made her way into the disgusting kitchen and returned with two smeary tumblers.
“It always comforts me that this house is so revolting that no woman but me could bear it. At least the mess proves to me you haven’t got a woman.”
“Who’d have me?” Leo said unwisely, pouring vodka.
“Oh, me, me, me—”
“I don’t count you.”
Her face grew suddenly sad and serious.
“One day you will count me.”
He looked at her. She said, “Do you think I’m at all pretty?”
He went on looking. After a while he said reflectively, “You are good-looking, I suppose, but you look so contrived and aggressive. Why don’t you let
your hair just lie down like hair likes to?”
“I like looking like this.”
“Then don’t ask me if I think you’re pretty.”
She said humbly, “I sort of need to know.”
If she became submissive, she always set off warning bells in Leo’s head.
“I’ve got a cause for you to put your extra energy into.”
“Oh, what, what?”
“A waif has turned up in our midst, an ex-chorister, unemployed and homeless. You talk to him and see if there’s some way anyone can help him. He’s becoming a slight problem and he is weighing on my conscience because it was me who found him weeping in the cathedral. I’ll introduce you.” Leo looked at his watch. “Time’s up. Out you go.”
“Oh—!”
He picked up the vodka bottle and rammed it into the pocket of her huge black cotton jacket.
“Out.”
“Will you kiss me?”
“No,” Leo said. “Kissing’s become very dangerous. I’ve no idea where you’ve been.”
“Oh, Leo—”
He took her arm and propelled her out into the hall towards the front door.
“Good night, Ianthe.”
She opened her mouth very wide. He said, “If you scream, you will wake Baby Chancellor and then Cherry will come out in her dressing gown and be very, very severe with you for a long time and I shall become quite furious because I need to get back to work. Good night.”
When he had shut the door, she subsided on to the step and sat there, hugging her knees and dwelling with pain and pleasure upon what a beautiful, wonderful bastard he was and her fervent hope that she would never outgrow the agony of her present feelings.
4
NICHOLAS ELLIOTT HAD TO BORROW A JACKET FROM THE SCHOOL secondhand clothes cupboard to make himself suitable for the cathedral. This was Sandra’s idea. Everyone else had gradually lost interest in him for the simple reason that his problem would not seem to solve itself and he remained helpless and slightly hopeless, and so responsibility for him filtered down to Sandra, who was appalled that he proposed to attend the organ service dressed in the jeans and sweatshirt layers that seemed to compose the whole of his wardrobe. Mrs. Cavendish produced some grey cord trousers that had been given to her for Cosmo, and that Cosmo had been outraged at the thought of wearing, and in the secondhand clothes cupboard, Sandra found what she thought was a very nice Donegal tweed jacket and some black shoes and an Old King’s tie. Docilely, Nicholas allowed himself to be dressed like a doll and felt a distinct comfort at being in someone else’s clothes, however alien to his taste. When he reached the cathedral he even felt pleased to be wearing the tie; it became his badge of belonging.
The Choir Page 5