The Choir

by Joanna Trollope

  “Leo, I do beg you to think again. It can only lead to the most awful unhappiness all round, particularly for that boy.”

  “Just mind your own business,” Leo said rudely, “would you?”

  And then he brushed past Alexander and banged out of the door, leaving the golden dust motes whirling agitatedly in the air behind him.

  The headmaster’s stall in the choir had often afforded Alexander refuge, as no doubt it had also done to all his predecessors over almost five hundred years. It gave him a marvellous view of the organ and with it a sense of the music rising over him like some tidal wave. The choristers directly ahead were always, at the beginnings of services, deeply conscious of him, but in the singing they forgot him and he could watch them with the admiration and affection they always inspired in him. There was such dignity in their absorption; it struck him every time. “They love it,” Leo had often said, “they love singing.” Three years ago, with the reluctant sanction of the dean and chapter, Alexander had given the choir Christmas off because he had felt that they should be with their families for once, and they had, the following year, pleaded to be allowed to stay. It struck him often that they liked being expected to achieve adult standards of behaviour, just as their profound enthusiasm for their music was as natural to them as breathing. “Miraculous,” a newspaper had called their dedication; they themselves considered it normal.

  The archdeacon, peering through pebble lenses like an old badger, came in to the chancel to take the service. Summer evensong never had quite the magic of winter evensong, when only the lamps in the choir stalls were lit, and the voices went soaring out into the vast dark quiet of the cathedral, but it was an unearthly time all the same. Alexander rose. The boys and the lay clerks waited before him, white and blue against the dark screen below the organ pipes, the third boy from the left Henry Ashworth, whose mother was having an affair with his choirmaster and organist. If it wasn’t for the music, where, Alexander wondered, could a boy like Henry turn, and yet, weirdly enough, if Henry were to discover about Leo, would not the music continue, strangely, to unite them? Unconsciously, in the intensity of his feeling, Alexander pounded his fist into his open palm and received a glare of the most stern reproof from the pebble lenses.

  “If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

  They knelt.

  “I wish,” Alexander prayed, “that I did not take everything so violently to heart. I wish I had dispassion. I wish I had coolness of judgement, and reserve. But as I seem to have none of those things by nature, and have failed dismally to acquire them in half a century of life, please help me to use all the uncontrollable energies I have instead to save this choir for this cathedral, because once it is gone, a terrible poverty will afflict the people that can never be assuaged by any other means. And while You are at it, please find Felicity and send her home, because I am stronger when she is by me and I need to be strong. And do something to save Henry Ashworth from being the innocent victim of a human muddle. I’m sorry about this list of wants when I am here to glorify You, but tonight the wants are uppermost in my mind and as You know better than anyone, I am always at the mercy of what is uppermost in my mind.”

  He opened his eyes and rose with the others to his feet. Psalm Sixty-one. The choir was poised, calm and ready.

  “From the ends of the earth I call to you, when my heart faints: O set me on a rock that is higher than I.”

  Alexander, shaking his head like a dog getting water out of its ears, grasped his service book with resolution. From his rock, he would defy every last one of them.

  7

  THE COUNTY ARCHIVIST, A GRAVE YOUNGISH WOMAN WITH A SWEET smile and huge tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles, put a black japanned box down on the table in front of Alexander.

  “I’m sorry to be so long, but even though you rang in advance, I hate taking documents like this out of the safe before I have to.”

  The county records office was housed in a long temporary-looking building behind Aldminster Brewery and hardly looked substantial enough to contain anything as solid as a safe. The room they were in reminded Alexander of the “hut” classrooms that had been put up at the King’s School when the numbers had begun to grow on his arrival.

  “I have to stay with you, I’m afraid—”

  “I shall be delighted,” he said gallantly.

  “It’s the regulations—”

  “Please don’t apologize.”

  She unlocked the box and opened the lid.

  “There,” she said, reverently.

  They both gazed inside as if at a holy relic. The charter lay before them, greying sixteenth-century vellum, brownish sixteenth-century ink.

  “May I touch it?” Alexander asked.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, “but I shouldn’t let you. I’ll lift it out for you if you like—”

  “Does that mean that if one has to produce it in court, you would have to come along too, as official bearer of Exhibit A?”

  She looked startled.

  “Court?”

  “I hope it won’t come to an actual court hearing, of course. I’m banking on the mere physical existence of the charter in this office being enough to save the choir. The wording has been printed many times.”

  She stared at him.

  “But, Mr. Troy, you can’t use the charter as evidence! Surely you realize that.”

  “Whyever not?”

  “Because it was never ratified. It was drawn up, exactly as you see it; but it never received the royal assent. You know the story, it’s in all the school histories, it’s in the guidebooks—the dispute with Bishop Fisher—”

  “Yes, I know that is technically the case, of course. But we have always observed the charter, in every detail. For four hundred years it has been our cornerstone—the school simply couldn’t have existed unless we had done so!”

  “The school has observed the charter voluntarily. But I’m afraid, in court, it would have no valid existence. It’s exactly like a will that has been properly drawn up in every detail but never actually signed.”

  Alexander sat down heavily on the nearest plastic chair.

  “Surely you were aware of this?”

  “Of what happened at the foundation, of course. It’s part of the school’s history. But the legal consequences had never occurred to me …”

  “Well, I don’t suppose the existence of the school as founded has ever been questioned before. Not in the courts, at any rate. Of course, the founder’s intentions are quite clear in his letters, but I doubt if they carry much legal weight either.”

  Alexander brightened a little.

  “Letters?”

  She bent over the box and with infinite delicacy lifted out several sheets of yellowed paper encased in clear stiff film.

  “Letters between Bishop Thomas and Henry VIII. The letters that explain to the king how he is starting a choir for the king’s benefit, and a school for the choristers to attend which will be named in the king’s honour. And this is the king’s reply. He says he is much gratified and pleased but no more. And then, look, the bishop writes again hinting at a royal charter and the king replies that he cannot give it yet for the great love he knows the bishop still bears to the pope. You see, the bishop wanted to be made an archbishop, and Henry refused because he believed him still a Catholic at heart. Isn’t it fascinating?” She looked quite exalted. “These letters are unique.”

  Alexander touched the top letter lightly.

  “They are wonderful, but they aren’t what I needed. I need a proper royal charter.”

  She looked worried.

  “There isn’t one. There are only the school statutes, which do indeed state that the life of the school shall only be the life of the choir, but of course that doesn’t have anything like the same legal weight.”

  Alexander brightened.


  “It might help. Thank you. Do you have a typescript of the relevant bits?”

  She nodded.

  “I can get you a copy. I’d like to help. I go to choral evensong every Sunday.” She gave him her pretty smile. “I’d conjure you up a valid royal charter if I could.”

  He grimaced.

  “It’s rather a blow.”

  “It’s ironic too. I believe Aldminster is the only King’s School which isn’t protected by royal charter.”

  He went home in some gloom via Chapter Yard. There was no reply to his knock but when he peered through the sitting-room window, he could see Leo in an armchair with his back to him and his feet on the television, talking into the telephone. He banged on the window, but Leo didn’t look round, so he propped himself against the house wall and wrote a quick résumé of his discovery on a blank page in his diary, tore it out and dropped it through Leo’s letter box.

  “Judith was really a genuine feminist,” Leo was saying into the telephone.

  “Don’t talk to me about feminists,” Sally exploded at the other end, “don’t mention bloody feminists. They haven’t a clue how ordinary women live, so they despise them and brand them as disloyal. They are a separate sex from ordinary women.”

  “I know. I only mentioned Judith’s feminism because you are so different, thank goodness. What about women priests, then?”

  “Hum,” Sally said happily, thinking. She loved these conversations, she loved Leo really asking her things and being properly interested in her replies. She had said a few days ago that she couldn’t bear omelettes and he had said at once, “Oh,why, tell me?” and she had said it was the gummy strands you might meet in the middle of them and he had listened seriously even to that. She had read somewhere that the early stages of a love affair are characterized by the ability to relish your lover’s reading even a telephone directory aloud, and perhaps in three months Leo wouldn’t care at all for her opinion on omelettes or women priests, but for the moment it was wonderful.

  “What if you were a woman parish priest and the old and sick needed visiting but all your children had measles and you couldn’t afford a nanny on your stipend?”

  “How practical.”

  “Women are practical.”

  “Then they would make good parish priests.”

  “And leave men to preach, I suppose—”

  “And be archbishops, of course.”

  “Of course. What’s that noise?”

  “Nicholas.”

  “Nicholas?”

  “Nicholas Elliott has come to be my lodger for a bit. I told you. That was him banging the front door and all this muttering is him saying sorry about banging the front door.”

  “I’ll ring you back later,” Sally said. “I’m going to make pancakes for Henry.”

  “Not too much later. I’ve got a lot more to ask you.”

  “About what?”

  “Oh, nuclear disarmament, the National Health Service, the philistinism of the present government, the jumble sale state of my wardrobe, things like that—”

  “Leo—”

  “Are you laughing?”

  “Yes. I’m putting the phone down.”

  The line clicked and fell silent.

  “Do you know,” Leo said, looking at the receiver, “that even the telephone is filthy.”

  “Ill clean it,” Nicholas said. “Here, I found this note for you.”

  Leo took it absently and looked round the sitting room.

  “You’ve done an amazing job in here. How do you know how?”

  “Matron.”

  Matron believed in Satan finding mischief for idle hands, so during Nicholas’s long weeks in the infirmary she had taught him to sweep floors before washing them and how to clean windows with hot water and vinegar and crumples of old newspaper. She had been matron at the King’s School when Nicholas was a school-boy and therefore represented to him something of a rock.

  “I suppose the secret is to forswear reading a single word of anything you pick up while clearing up.”

  “I don’t read much—”

  “No. I’ve noticed. It irritates me rather. Why don’t you?”

  “I’ve got out of the habit, I suppose.”

  “Well, get back in it. I can’t share the house with an illiterate, however handy with a duster.”

  “I wouldn’t know where to begin—”

  “Do you want me to thump you?” Leo said in exasperation.

  “Suggest something,” Nicholas said, struggling to make an effort.

  “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, and The Collector by John Fowles, and don’t say you haven’t got either, because I’ve got both. And don’t ask me which is shorter, either.”

  “I wasn’t going to.”

  “What were you going to do?”

  “I’m going to see a film.”

  “Good. Because I’m going to work.”

  “I’ll go and get ready.”

  He went upstairs and came down again five minutes later looking precisely the same. Leo was at the piano scribbling on a score.

  “Shall I pick up some Chinese for supper?”

  “Good idea. There’s some money on the draining board.”

  “I feel bad I can’t pay you anything.”

  “You will when you can.”

  “I like it here,” Nicholas said, grateful and awkward.

  “Nick—”

  “OK, OK, I’m going.”

  Walking down the Lyng towards the cinema, Nicholas thought about Leo. He was easier to deal with than most people in Aldminster because he just came straight out with things and told you you were being a pain if he thought you were. Nicholas felt genuinely bad about the money, but Alexander had forbidden him to register for the dole if he hadn’t even tried to get a job, and he hadn’t, and then Alexander had found some ancient charity somewhere in the school records and was giving Nicholas a tenner a week so he wasn’t utterly destitute, and the school was helping with his food. Out of the first tenner, he’d bought a tin of furniture polish he intended to use on all the furniture in Leo’s sitting room. He didn’t suppose Leo would notice for a moment, but it made him feel better to be planning it.

  He suspected he might have a mild crush on Leo. Leo seemed so in charge of himself, so that even though he was clearly crazy about Sally Ashworth, he could switch off from her absolutely and be a musician through and through. It looked to Nicholas as if Leo knew where he was going and what he wanted; there was nothing pathetic about Leo. Leo would never go mooching off to a cinema alone, not knowing what he was going to see, and when he got there probably not be able to choose between Studio One or Studio Two and no doubt not go into either in the end. Leo had told him he was apathetic, and he knew he was, in a way, except that it wasn’t so much general indifference as not knowing what to care about. He felt good when he had had his first assault on Leo’s kitchen, really good, until Cherry Chancellor had come and said, “Now who did this!” and he found he didn’t want to say that he had. She gave him some rubber gloves as a joke and he hated that.

  There was a queue outside the Studio One entrance for a film of an E. M. Forster novel. Nicholas didn’t much want to see it, but he didn’t want Leo to call him illiterate again, so he joined the queue behind a middle-aged man in big glasses and a woman wearing a denim flying suit too young for her. They were talking about the cinema in a very professional-sounding way and the woman kept saying, “I simply think he knows what he’s doing. Those films simply work.” Her hair was tousled and streaked and she had huge silver earrings like swinging shields. Nicholas supposed they were married; he could imagine them shopping together in Habitat. The man said, “I know what I meant to tell you. I heard it at lunch today. They’re going to axe the choir.”

  The woman’s head jerked up.

  “The cathedral choir? You don’t mean it!”

  “Sign of the times, I gather. Can’t afford it anymore. The cathedral roof is collapsing and all the money has to go on
that.”

  “This is very serious,” the woman said.

  “It’s hardly one of the best in the country—”

  “All the same—”

  “And another thing. They’ve got planning permission for a block of loos bang in the middle of that nice medieval bit at the bottom of the Lyng.”

  “You don’t mean it—”

  “Ramps for wheelchairs, toddler changing room—”

  “Annex for junkies?”

  “Wouldn’t put it past them. God, I hope this film’s worth it, look at the prices—”

  “It will be,” the woman said, “I promise you. His films simply work”

  Nicholas loved the film. It was optimistic and romantic and the photography of Italy particularly was beautiful. He went out of the cinema very much wanting to go to Italy and to be in love, and only when he was buying spring rolls and sweet-and-sour chicken from the Wong Kee Fish Bar did he remember about the choir. He ran back to Chapter Yard with an urgency he hadn’t felt about anything for years and dumped the takeaway pots on the piano and said to Leo, “What’s this about the choir?”

  Leo’s mind came from a long musical distance away at its own pace.

  “What?”

  “I heard a couple in the queue saying the choir has to go because the cathedral’s falling down.”

  “Roughly, that’s the threat.”

  “But they can’t!”

  “They can, I’m afraid. We thought we were protected by a royal charter but it turns out that we aren’t—the choir was apparently Bishop Thomas’s own idea to try and please Henry VIII because he wanted to be made an archbishop. We are going to do everything in our power to stop them. The dean proposes the council should take the choir over and save the chapter fifty thousand pounds a year.”

  “The council don’t know anything about music.”

  “I know.”

  “I—I’d like to murder someone—”

  “Good for you.”

  “What are you going to do?”