The Choir

by Joanna Trollope

  “A grand!”

  She lit a cigarette and drew tremendously on it.

  “Something like that. What are you going to do?”

  “Don’t know. Keep hoping something will turn up.”

  “Might be able to help you,” Ianthe said in the offhand voice people use when they say they’ll ring you and then never do.

  “Yeah,” Nicholas said, understanding her tone. “Thanks.”

  “No. Really. I’ll see about it.”

  “I’ve got a bit depressed—”

  “Don’t tell me,” Ianthe said. “I get right down, but I mean down.”

  She ordered more wine and Nicholas told her about his mother and his father and his father’s new family, and being sent down from Oxford. She became quite sympathetic and when they had, between them, finished the bowl of brown sugar that stood on the table ready for coffee, and the wine, they went out into Lydbrook Street and Ianthe said she would take Nicholas down to the dockland pubs the next morning; otherwise Sunday might really get to them both. Nicholas went home to his room in the infirmary quite cheerfully, for him, and Ianthe went home via Chapter Yard and observed that Leo actually appeared to be trying to clear up his sitting room. He was wearing corduroy jeans and a checked shirt and he looked so isolated and sexy that her knees nearly gave way under her, and she almost knocked on the window. But then she remembered she was furious with him for putting her down in public that afternoon, so she strode on home and woke Cosmo up because she felt like listening to music but didn’t want to do it alone.

  Leo had come back to Chapter Yard feeling extremely restless—no doubt the tensions and excitements of the afternoon accounted for that—and was for the first time absolutely exasperated to open the sitting-room door and find the room exactly as he had left it. It looked as if he had thrown all the contents in and then stirred them about with a giant spoon. It was so unintelligent to live like this, because it was exhausting and sapped creative energies. He picked up the nearest tape lying on a pile of old newspapers and colour supplements and slammed it into the cassette player and it was Vaughan Williams’s Job, which he wasn’t really in the mood for, but he couldn’t bear to waste ten or twenty or forty minutes hunting for the Fauré he would have preferred.

  He made himself a sandwich and a mug of coffee and took them into the very heart of the muddle to assess the situation. The first move was clearly to see what there was that he could throw out. Newspapers, of course, months’ worth of flown and forgotten Sundays, easy to throw away as long as he didn’t allow himself to be seduced by a single headline as he threw; and then books back in bookshelves once he had removed all the other objects from the latter, and sheet music in a box, well, several boxes, and cushions on chairs not the floor, and clothes in a heap to take upstairs, and the wires sorted out a bit so they didn’t form this lethal sort of crochet over everything …

  He started well. He went round to the Chancellors’ and borrowed two dustbin bags. “I had to smile,” Cherry said to her husband. “Leo clearing up!” He asked her for two bags, so she gave him precisely that, off a bargain roll. He took them back and filled one in twenty minutes, and then he came across the photograph book he and Judith had made when they were first married, and was about to throw that in too and then couldn’t resist one look, and there was Judith, scowling over her flute, so he sat down with the book and turned the pages. There was Judith on their penurious honeymoon in the Quantocks, wearing jeans and gym shoes; himself up a ladder painting the window frames of the first house they had, in Lincoln, with his first proper job; Judith reading in the garden with her hair all over her face; Judith asleep in a bed that looked as if a combine harvester had been across it. It had been hopeless, his marriage to Judith. She wasn’t designed by nature to live with or for anybody but herself. And yet he had pestered her to marry him, bothered the life out of her for months until she had relented at last, saying warningly that she wasn’t going to change for anybody. And she didn’t. When the rapture of the first months was over, it began to madden Leo that she would make no concessions to a shared life at all. All she wanted to do was to sing and to play her flute and to work, increasingly, for the women’s movement. They lived in squalor and acrimony. Judith took to going to Greenham Common for weekends, and then for weeks on end, and when she was arrested and Leo went to try and prevent her from going to jail, she told him to go to hell, and she went to jail anyway. When she came out, she returned, briefly, to Rochester, where he was then assistant organist, collected her possessions, and left. They were divorced a year later, and Leo resigned his post because he was made to feel that he had to.

  He moved away, right across England, and got a job teaching music in the big girls’ public school in Aldminster: St. Mary’s. He knew nothing about Aldminster, or girls. He had a tiny flat in the school, and some of the girls besieged him there, and there was an embarrassing, unavoidable episode with an excitable Iranian girl, who had become obsessed with him, and he was again faced with resignation or dismissal.

  He was taken in, a refugee, by Martin Chancellor. Martin was a bachelor then, and assistant to the amiable, indolent, unadventurous organist who had played the organ at Aldminster for twenty-five years. Martin and Leo had met in the city’s musical circles and had quite liked each other; there was, Leo deduced, at least nothing in Martin Chancellor to dislike. For four months, Leo gave private piano lessons in the mornings and evenings and nursed his grievances during interminable solitary afternoons, and then the organist had a heart attack, quite without warning, and Leo, in a burst of defiance against outdated values, applied for the post.

  He was by far the best organist of the applicants; even Martin Chancellor, feeling keenly that Leo had bitten very hard the hand that fed him, admitted that. But he was divorced. It was a great stumbling block to the dean and chapter, and if it had not been for the bishop, Leo would never have succeeded. The bishop summoned Leo to him and talked to him in a way that seemed gentle to the point of blandness until he looked back on it and saw how probing the bishop had been. They had talked first of music.

  Why cathedral music, the bishop had asked, why not organ recitals, conducting, records, instruction—no problem at all with such skills as Leo’s? Why not found his own choir? He would earn only seven thousand a year at Aldminster after all, so was this not a piece of unworldly and pointless recklessness? Leo, turning a teacup round and round in his hands, said that all that really seemed to satisfy him, the only situation in which he felt, heart and soul, that he had come home, was to play and hear sacred music in a sacred place.

  “Are you a Christian?” the bishop asked.

  “I don’t know. I struggle—”

  “There are so many ways of being a Christian.”

  “I come closest to faith when I am playing a cathedral organ, and as that is also the time when I feel most richly fulfilled, I suppose that makes me at best a very lopsided part-time Christian.”

  “You are an exceptionally good organist,” the bishop said.

  He had sat silent then, swinging one foot under his purple cassock, until he began to ask Leo about his marriage. Leo tried to be fair and truthful.

  “Do you hate her?”

  “No. But I am still angry sometimes.”

  “Anger,” the bishop said, picking up his own teacup and finding to his regret that it was empty, “is a very different matter from hate. And as to your divorce”—he paused and waved his empty cup thoughtfully—“in my view, a Christian marriage is a good one, not necessarily a first one.”

  Instinctively, both their gazes were drawn beyond the study windows to where Janet Young, in an old jersey of the bishop’s, was cutting down spent Michaelmas daisies.

  “I have been extraordinarily lucky,” said the bishop. “It seems to me that you and your wife were not.”

  When Leo got up to go, he said, “Thank you so much for seeing me. I know there isn’t any hope really but it’s been a comfort to talk.”

  The bis
hop shook his hand.

  “I shall pray about this a great deal, and talk in certain quarters very much less.” A thought struck him. “Did you know that Bach sired twenty children? In two marriages. Extraordinary.” He let Leo’s hand go. “God bless you.”

  Three weeks later, Leo moved into the neighbouring house to Martin Chancellor’s in Chapter Yard, as organist of Aldminster. Alexander Troy had come to see him at once and they had liked each other immensely and found that they shared similar ambitions for the choir. Then Felicity had come, and Leo had supposed himself in love with her, because she was so distinguished and delightful, and because, in his gratitude to the bishop or God or whoever it was, he had an overflowing heart and the overflow needed a channel.

  He had been happier, those five years at Aldminster, than anywhere before. The reputation of the cathedral’s music grew steadily, and so did Leo’s own ability, so that if he went into the cathedral, as he often did, for the exhilarating and extraordinary release of extemporizing, he would emerge from the organ to find a considerable audience. St. Mary’s had even asked him to return to run the music department once more—the new headmistress, a breezy woman who had spent most of her career in America, said that Leo was a fine musician and she didn’t care about old tattle—which doubled his income. He had friends and briefly, after Felicity Troy had with great kindness told him not to be an ass, a girlfriend, head of Horsley Art School’s graphic department. Leo had rather enjoyed her, and it had been a relief to have someone to go to bed with, but his great liking for her would not somehow turn itself into love. They were still friends and Leo didn’t any longer want them to be more, although he did feel, increasingly, that he wasn’t building the human side of his life as he was the musical side.

  He closed the photograph book and put it in a dustbin bag. Then he got it out again and put it on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, underneath a pile of National Geographic magazines. Judith wasn’t dead, after all, and they had been married. You couldn’t just eliminate either her or the marriage. He looked round the room. He was suddenly immensely tired; the rest would have to wait. He turned off the lamps, picked up the heap of clothes, and trudged upstairs. In the morning, Cherry Chancellor, nipping out early to get the Sunday papers, noticed that his sitting room looked exactly the same except that the two grey dustbin bags now squatted in the chaos like a pair of begging hippopotami.

  Hugh Cavendish could not sleep that night. He was filled with a kind of sober exhilaration, a feeling that he had found a mission. He lay in bed beside the solid and slumbering Bridget, and then, after an hour of lying wakeful, he got up and put on his dressing gown, and went down to the kitchen, where Benedict, though sleepily pleased to see him, made it very plain that one in the morning was no time to stir from one’s basket.

  The dean made tea and a piece of toast, and found paper and a pencil and settled himself down at the kitchen table. It was very warm, thanks to the stove, and quiet. The dean drew a rough plan of the cathedral, and marked in the significant objects and then, as round black dots, the present position of the lights. The positions hadn’t really changed in years—except for an attempt in the fifties to make them complement the natural light in the cathedral—not from the late nineteenth century, when the gas lamps had required the poor bedesmen to clamber eternally up and down the western staircase to light and then extinguish them.

  The V. and A. man had been right. What the cathedral needed now was new lighting, concealed lighting with no dazzle, lighting that would enhance the beauty and the mystery of the building. There was no doubt too, after this afternoon, that the musical reputation of the cathedral would go from strength to strength, and there would be concerts and recitals, and, of course, musicians were always greedy for more light. As to funding it, well, there were the Friends of the Cathedral, bless them, and, of course, the Historic Churches people, and it was many years since Aldminster had applied to them for anything, so they might look quite responsively on such a request. He must see about a lighting designer, of course, and consult the cathedral architect, who had proved such an indefatigable ally over the restoration of the organ. The organ. The dean’s happy and swift train of thought stopped abruptly. The organ, the glorious, renovated organ, brought with it an enormous snag, in the shape of Leo Beckford. Leo, brilliant organist though he was, pulled against the dean, no denying it. So, in a less aggressive way, did Alexander Troy. If Martin Chancellor had been organist, the dean thought, he would have been an ally, his aim would have been to bring both the instrument and the choir within the dean’s benevolent sway over cathedral and close. But Beckford and Troy made the dean feel that the choir was so much not his that it was almost, at times, in opposition to him. He would even, he thought, go so far as to believe that they deliberately kept the choir from him. But they could not keep the organ from him, and without the organ, Leo had no future as an increasingly visible national musician. He must be delicate. He must control Leo without losing him. He must rule his beloved possessions with diplomacy as well as strength and benevolence. Pulling the paper and pencil towards him, he resolved to start with the practicalities. He made a list of people to telephone, and a second piece of toast. Of course, the interior masonry would have to be washed if it was to be better illumined; he must see the works yard about spare scaffolding.

  The cathedral clock struck two. Benedict raised his head and listened. At the table, the dean pushed away his paper and plate and cup, and folding his hands and bowing his head down on them, he began most thankfully to pray. “There is no need to say anything when you pray,” the dean had heard Bishop Robert say at a recent confirmation in the city. “Just take time to look at God. And let Him look at you. That’s all.”

  5

  WHEN IT BECAME KNOWN AMONG THE COUNCILLORS OF ALDMINSTER that the dean and chapter were looking for forty-five thousand pounds to fund new lighting in the nave and aisles of the cathedral, Frank Ashworth felt it would be a good moment to renew his suggestion about purchasing the headmaster’s house. He found the dean in a very different mood from the one he had been in at their last interview, very buoyant and not in the least pliable.

  “Mr. Ashworth, we are not, I am happy to tell you, in the position that men of finance call demandeur. The Friends of the Cathedral can raise two-thirds of the sum, and we can obtain grants for the remainder.”

  “We can wait,” Frank Ashworth said. “There’s no hurry. No doubt you’ll need the money someday.”

  “I must be honest with you,” the dean said in tones of the smoothest confidentiality. “You must dismiss all hopes of the headmaster’s house. The cathedral and its close will be attracting an immensely increased number of visitors and the environment must of course be protected for them.”

  “Does it not trouble you,” Frank said slowly, “to be spending so much money on new lighting when not only is the old lighting perfectly adequate to most people’s minds, but when the city needs money so badly to help its people?”

  “The cathedral belongs to the city and its people. They are very proud of it—”

  “Lights in the cathedral won’t help them find jobs or cure them when they’re sick—”

  “Mr. Ashworth,” the dean said with an authoritativeness Frank knew better than to match just now, “you and your council look after housing and employment and health. We leave you to do that. We care for other vital elements in mankind. You leave us to do that. Good morning.”

  Frank’s reply was to make an appointment to see the bishop. Robert Young opened the door of the palace himself, to a waft of baking and Radio Three from the kitchen, and led Frank into his long light study with its battered furniture and books and model airplanes on the mantelpiece.

  “I can’t, you know,” Bishop Robert said, biting the earpiece of his spectacles, “interfere with the dean and chapter business. I serve the diocese, not the cathedral alone.”

  “It’s the principle I’ve come to talk about, Bishop.”

  “Mm.”

>   “It bothers me that so few people in the city use the close and the cathedral.”

  “It bothers me,” the bishop said.

  “To be frank with you, Bishop, the close scares them off. It’s too elitist.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so.”

  The bishop put on his spectacles.

  “Let me think.”

  After a minute or two, he said, “In a sense you are right. People are disconcerted by a ritual they have not been brought up to find familiar. In that sense, the cathedral might look like some kind of club whose rules they don’t know. But not elitist in the sense I think you mean. An elite, if I understand it, is the pick, the flower of something. In God’s eyes, there is in humanity no such thing.”

  Frank said, smiling, “I didn’t come to talk theology—”

  “Were we?”

  “Edging that way. I came to put to you the idea that the people of the city should have a place, a building, that is their own, to help them to feel comfortable—”

  “A secular place? A meeting place?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am all in favour of encouraging people to use the cathedral. I spend a lot of time urging people I meet to do just that. And I can see that a meeting house might get them closer, although I am always opposed to anything artificial because that simply confounds the problem.” He looked at Frank Ashworth and said determinedly, “You can only win people lastingly to anything, by love.”