The Choir

by Joanna Trollope

“Fight,” Leo said, “write letters, petition, rack our brains for schemes to raise money—”

  “Does the choir know?”

  “Not officially.”

  “It makes me sick—”

  Leo got up.

  “If you could think of a scheme, it would mean instant canonization for you. Can we eat? Whatever’s in there?”

  “I’ll heat it. It gets all gluey cold. I read a book this evening but I read it in the cinema.”

  “Good,” Leo said. He looked at Nicholas. “I’m pleased to see you angry.”

  “I’m furious.”

  They ate standing up in the kitchen, using spoons for the chicken and their fingers for the rolls. Then Nicholas said he was going to turn in, and Leo let himself out of the house and walked across the close and down through the steep quiet streets to Blakeney Street. When she opened the door, Sally said, “Oh, how lovely,” and then she kissed him and said, “Henry’s got hold of some awful rumour about the choir.”

  “Mr. Dean,” Alexander said sonorously, his hand on Henry’s surpliced shoulder, “I present to you Henry Francis Ashworth, to be admitted chorister of this cathedral.”

  Henry stepped forward. The choir stalls were packed and only he and Chilworth and the dean and the headmaster were standing in the middle at the foot of the altar steps. He raised his face, framed by its new ruff, towards the dean. The dean held up his hand in a gesture of benediction.

  “Henry Francis Ashworth, by the authority committed to me I install you a chorister of this cathedral church. May the Lord grant you the will to obey, the power to lead, and the grace to accomplish the various tasks of your position. The Lord watch over your going out and your coming in from this time forth for evermore. Amen.”

  He put his hand on Henry’s head. Henry bowed it slightly and said “Amen” in response. He was greatly relieved. What Briggs told him must be wrong, because they’d never make new choristers if they were going to do away with the choir altogether. Wooldridge said Briggs was a piss artist, which Henry felt was a description that fitted him just right, whatever it meant. And the bishop had come. The bishop wouldn’t have come unless the whole thing was serious. You had to have a choir, in Henry’s opinion; otherwise the cathedral would be just like a museum. It was just the kind of rumour Briggs would invent because his voice wasn’t good enough for the choir; his last thing was saying he didn’t believe in God, and when everyone got bored with that, he’d started about the choir.

  “Michael Anthony Roper Chilworth,” the dean was saying.

  Chilworth’s ears were bright pink. He’d told Henry that his parents wanted him to be a chorister more than he wanted to be but he’d give it a whirl. He liked the singing, he just didn’t like all the time it took away from cricket in the summer and football in the winter. Chilworth was very offhand about his own voice, but he was always very generous about Henry’s. Being in the choir, Henry thought, made you get on with each other.

  Back in the choir stalls they stopped being particular and were merged back into the choir itself. First the thirteenth-century hymn to Saint Magnus and then Wooldridge and Henry alone together with Lalouette’s “O mysterium ineffabile.” They got through it without a hitch. Then prayers and an address by the dean about the unifying glory of music that caused Leo and Alexander much need for self-control at their separate seats in the organ loft and the stalls, and then “Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven,” and everyone filed out while Leo gave his all to Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor. In the choir vestry, Chilworth and Henry solemnly unbuttoned each other’s ruff.

  “The Vienna Boys Choir have to wear sailor suits. With shorts.”

  “I’m starving,” Henry said.

  Chilworth produced half a bar of something from his pocket.

  “You can have that. I’ve gone off peanuts.”

  Henry said, “Briggs says they’re going to get rid of the choir because there’s no more money.”

  Chilworth quoted his father.

  “You don’t want to listen to gossip. Anyway, they’re going to take us to Norway next year.”

  “Norway! I thought it was France.”

  “Yup. My father heard.”

  “I’ve never been in a plane!”

  Martin Chancellor came in to chivvy them.

  “Get on with it, you lot. Ruffs in the box, please, Mason.”

  “If you put conkers on a cello string, you can really whack with them—”

  “Harrison, pick up that surplice, don’t stand on it—”

  “I’ve got the video of Superman III—”

  “Botham’s brilliant—”

  “Harrison, did you hear me?”

  “You do have to go in a plane to Norway, don’t you?”

  “Sir, sir, Briggs says they’re going to disband the choir—”

  A sudden silence.

  “It’s—been suggested,” Martin Chancellor said. He and Cherry had worked out their reply to such questions over supper the night before. “But nobody should worry. There is a strong chance that someone else may take it over if the dean and chapter decide to let it go.”

  “But would we still sing in the cathedral?”

  “There wouldn’t be much point in you singing anywhere else, now would there?”

  “But if the dean isn’t in charge—”

  “We don’t know he won’t be.”

  Harrison said defiantly, “I’m not singing anywhere that isn’t the cathedral. There’s no point.”

  “I’m afraid it isn’t our decision.”

  “Mr. Beckford will be livid.”

  From the doorway to the vestry Leo said, “Mr. Beckford already is.”

  They turned to him.

  “I hope,” he said to Martin, “that you’ve been whipping up a little youthful support?”

  Martin said, “It’s hardly my place—”

  Leo took a breath. He looked round at the boys.

  “Hands up,” he said, “all those in favour of keeping the choir as a fundamental part of the Cathedral of Aldminster.”

  Twenty-four hands went up. Chilworth said, “What’s fundamental?”

  “Right. Hands down. I’ll let you know when I’m issuing rifles to defend the choir stalls. I should get in a bit of target practice.”

  Martin thought how Cherry would disapprove of jokes about firearms. He said, “I don’t think we should listen to rumours. Nothing is decided, after all.”

  “All I’m doing is trying to stop the wrong decision being made.”

  “My father’s got a twelve-bore—”

  “I’ve got an air gun—”

  “We’ve got a really brilliant catapult—”

  “Now look what you’ve started,” Martin said quietly.

  “It’s only talk. But it’ll ginger them all up and their opinion counts.”

  Martin opened his mouth to say that, choristers or not, they were only children, but closed it again. That would be Cherry’s opinion, he knew, but for once, he realized that Cherry was wrong.

  “Now,” said Bridget Cavendish playfully to Janet Young, meeting her in the post office, “are we going to mention The Subject or are we not?”

  Janet Young, who had had an unwanted letter that morning from a consortium of village WIs complaining that Mrs. Cavendish was allowing them less and less autonomy, smiled as warmly as she could and said, “Not.”

  “Hugh’s having sleepless nights,” Bridget said, taking no notice but managing to observe that the bishop’s wife’s feet were bare inside her sandals, which, even if they were nice feet and brown, which they were, and even if the day was hot, which it was, was really appalling. “It’s so unjust. He’s trying to preserve the city’s heritage, the nation’s heritage and all he gets is the vilest abuse. I knew we were wrong to appoint Leo Beckford as organist. He’s wholly unsuitable and his attitude is absolutely secular. And the poor headmaster doesn’t know if he’s coming or going with that wife of his, so one really can’t hope for a sensible opinion fr
om him.”

  “Six first-class stamps,” Janet Young said through the grille, “and this parcel second class, please, and a passport renewal form.”

  “I must say, I don’t blame you wanting to get away from it all for a bit—”

  “It’s for Matthew. He isn’t very organized—”

  “Don’t talk to me about children. Or rather schools. If only Hugh had listened to me about Cosmo and sent him to Marlborough, where my family have always gone. Have you spoken to Rachel Frost?”

  Janet had spent an hour on the telephone listening to what the archdeacon’s wife had to say about the choir.

  “She’s spoken to me.”

  “She supports us, of course.”

  Janet picked up her stamps and change.

  “I don’t think she’s very musical.”

  Bridget put a hand on Janet’s arm.

  “Do tell me what the bishop thinks. In perfect confidence, of course.”

  “Robert and I are trying very hard not to talk about it just now.”

  “But you must have an opinion.”

  “Oh yes,” Janet said, and smiled again, “we have an opinion, but we are holding on to it for the moment until the air clears a little.”

  “It won’t clear, you know, unless people speak up.”

  Janet’s smile grew enormous.

  “Do forgive me. I’ve simply got to run. Robert’s got a confirmation over at Handley and I’ve promised to drive him so he can work on his talk on the way. Isn’t this heat lovely?”

  “Lovely,” Bridget said and then turned to be commanding to the post office clerk to relieve her feelings. Heaven knows what the Youngs’ position on this business was. What support could you expect from a bishop who plainly preferred his parish priests to his senior clergy and the laity to them? When she had challenged him recently about his support for sanctions against South Africa in the synod, he had given her a twinkling look and said, “Don’t you think bishops ought to be pink?” and she had been much disconcerted to realize he was teasing her. When he had then relented and told her that he had voted for sanctions because he believed firmly that the synod should present a united front, she had become very confused and not known what to think because he seemed to elude her every pigeonhole. And now here was Janet Young being secretive and walking about the cathedral city with bare legs. At least, she wouldn’t be doing any lobbying among clergy wives, which left the coast clear for Bridget; Huffo was going to get massive support, she’d certainly see to that. She’d made two lists, one for the close and one for the diocese, and she was thankful that Felicity Troy was out of the way for the moment, because you could never rely on Felicity to do anything orthodox or to refrain from winning people over just by looking at them, it seemed.

  “Two pounds sixty-four,” the post office girl said.

  “Tell me,” Bridget said in her particularly encouraging voice, “tell me what you think about the cathedral choir.”

  The girl stared.

  “I don’t really care,” she said, “not one way or the other.”

  Hugh Cavendish thought Napoleon must have felt like this before Waterloo, not really trusting new allies who had been enemies only months before and rather uncertain as to the size of the opposition. His own assessment was complicated by the fact that he did not wish to play quite straight by his biggest ally, the city council, because he had no intention at all of selling them the headmaster’s house, but every intention of using it as a carrot. He thought privately that they would make a fearful horlicks of running the choir but could see at present no other way of achieving his various goals, both overt and covert, without disbanding the choir altogether, which he shrank from. He had not shrunk at all at the beginning, but to his irritation Ianthe had started him off during an enraged telephone call when she said she not only had a philistine for a father but a butcher of history to boot. The last phrase she had once overheard Leo using about someone quite different, but the dean was not to know that and was much wounded by her eloquence. The chapter at least was behind him, except Canon Yeats, whom everyone else talked down into miserable silence—“They wouldn’t let me speak,” he told his wife in despair that night—and all the canons seemed relieved at the possible prospect of no longer having to be governors of the King’s School, which they appeared to find a chore, particularly as there was no remuneration.

  “The plain truth is,” Canon Ridley said, “we are all flat-out with work as it is. Everything conflicts. We simply can’t make the school the priority it ought to be.”

  Hugh Cavendish had let a small silence fall and then he had said, “Quite.”

  As to the choral music, again only Canon Yeats had seemed anguished.

  “There’s still our organ,” everyone had said encouragingly.

  “But it isn’t the same. Spiritually speaking. Nothing uplifts like the perfect treble.”

  “Only because that is what we are used to. Anyway I disagree. To me the organ is the king of instruments.”

  Canon Yeats had been disentangled from his sticks and helped down the stairs with particular assiduousness and assisted very tenderly into his car.

  “A good man,” Hugh Cavendish said, looking after him as the car jerked its way towards the city, “a good priest. But oh he does hate change.”

  Canon Yeats represented only a small and ineffectual part of the opposition, however. The dean knew that he could count on his organist as an enemy, possibly his assistant organist too, although he was a much meeker character, the headmaster, and such local support as they could rally. The issue was unlikely to attract national attention because Aldminster was not a famous choir, and the need to save the fabric of the cathedral would attract the huge national pro-restoration lobby in any case. He would use the next chapter meeting to draw up a formal proposal, and invite an equally formal offer from the council for the headmaster’s house. In the meantime he proposed to get estimates and schedules of works to confront the opposition, who would, he was quite confident, have nothing so efficient to counter him with.

  When Ianthe Cavendish got off the train at Aldminster on a grey June Friday evening, the first thing she did was to buy a copy of the Echo from the stall outside the station. The headline said, CHOIR MUST GO TO SAVE CATHEDRAL, and then, underneath, CLOSE HOUSE TO BE BOUGHT FOR THE PEOPLE. It was rather under a mile from the station to the close, so Ianthe bought a packet of cigarettes and a fudge bar from the nearest sweet-shop to sustain her, hitched her black canvas bag onto her back, and walked along, chewing and smoking and reading the paper. Her father had told the Echo, it seemed, that in only a decade over half a million pounds would be saved by not maintaining the choir, money that could be spent on the cathedral. There was a photograph of her father and Benedict outside the south door of the cathedral, and below it one of the choir in procession with AXED printed in heavy type underneath it. There were indignant remarks from several of the choristers’ parents, including a quotation from Sally Ashworth, who had said, seemingly, “It’s appalling and we are going to fight every inch of the way.” The headmaster and the organist had apparently declined to comment, but for all that, the paper’s leader described the close as being in an uproar, with people either at one another’s throats or refusing to speak to one another. Ianthe, dislodging bits of fudge from her back teeth with her tongue, thought the weekend promised to be rather fun.

  She hadn’t meant to come down to Aldminster again, not for months. She had meant to stay right away from Leo after he had been so awful to her, and she had attempted very hard to fall in love with a journalist on a rock magazine who seemed really keen on her and had even, to her amazement and no doubt to his own as well, sent her flowers. Nobody had ever sent Ianthe flowers. It made her feel temporarily very romantically inclined towards the journalist, but only, it seemed, when he wasn’t there. When she saw him, she thought about Leo almost all the time, which hardly gave the journalist a chance. She’d tried to talk to Petra about it, but Petra was in the middle of
making a pretty marvellous enormous metal horse, rather Greek somehow, and couldn’t concentrate on anything else. It was a commission, too, which was exciting, and in any case Petra, grown weary of her lover’s wife’s depredations in the studio, had thrown him out and was trying not to miss him, so she wasn’t in a very sympathetic mood about love. Fergus’s beautiful Minna wasn’t much help either, because she’d been brought up in America and she believed you must never let a man kick you around. If Fergus treated her, just once, the way Leo had behaved to Ianthe, she said, she’d have been out that door like lightning. Ianthe had tried to explain that she had never, unfortunately, been in Leo’s door, so to speak, but Minna was much more interested in her own point of view than in Ianthe’s predicament anyway, so she was not a satisfactory confidante either.

  Ianthe had thought and thought about what she should do to change things with Leo. One thing was clear: she mustn’t beg him for anything else; she really had to play it as cool as she could. She also had to show him that she wasn’t yobbish, which he seemed to think. She had a new haircut which was certainly more becoming, though pretty square, and had bought some less aggressive makeup and, because Ikon had, to its own astonishment, signed up a group whose second record was actually in the top fifty, a few new clothes. She also concocted a plan designed to show Leo that she was a responsible human being, as well as to provide Ikon with a dogsbody, which it badly needed. They had all agreed they needed a sympathetic and musical dogsbody, instead of a girl called Sharon, who was only interested in getting back to Brentford on time each night and filed her nails between phone calls. Ianthe had had her brain-wave then and said she thought she could fix it.

  When she got to the deanery she found her mother in the kitchen making a salad and Cosmo sitting on the edge of the table picking the bits out of it that he liked.

  “Don’t,” Bridget was saying.

  “Tomatoes are good for me.”

  “They can be good for you at supper.”

  Ianthe said, “Hi,” and slung her bag on to the floor and the paper onto the table.

  “What a fight seems to be going on around here!”