The Choir

by Joanna Trollope

  “You’ve had your hair cut, dear. Very pretty.”

  “It’s not pretty.”

  “No,” Cosmo said, “it’s not.”

  “You haven’t been down for weeks,” Bridget said fondly. “Naughty girl.”

  “Work, Mum.”

  “There’s no such thing,” Cosmo said.

  Bridget patted his bony black-clad knee.

  “Bad boy.”

  She came round the table and kissed Ianthe and looked her over.

  “You do look nice, dear. What pretty earrings.”

  “Mum …” Ianthe pleaded.

  “You go and have a wash and I’ll make you a cup of coffee. You smell of trains.”

  “I’ve been on one. And I’d rather have whisky.”

  “Don’t show off, dear.”

  Cosmo cackled.

  “I’ve got some duty-free in my room. Brent got it when he went on the hovercraft to France for the day.”

  “Cosmo!”

  “I haven’t drunk it all—”

  “Too stupid,” Bridget said. “I don’t know whether you are worse apart or together.”

  The telephone rang from the hall. Alert instantly, Bridget put her knife down and went to answer it.

  “You’ve come down to see Leo,” Cosmo said.

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “You’re wasting your time.”

  “What do you know about it? You’re only a kid. Anyway, it isn’t him I’ve come to see.”

  “Who then?”

  “Not telling. Where’s your whisky?”

  “In a welly in my room. Who are you seeing?”

  “Nick Elliott.”

  “Nick Elliott!”

  “Not like that, idiot. Business.”

  Cosmo got off the table.

  “If I give you some whisky can I borrow your black T-shirt with the bat on it?”

  “OK.”

  They went out into the hall and as they passed their mother, Bridget was saying, “Actually, Rachel, we’re quite pleased with the coverage in the Echo. Hardly a voice raised in protest, my dear. Hugh really comes into his own over this sort of business.”

  “What do you think?” Ianthe asked Cosmo as they began to climb the stairs. He grinned at her.

  “I like the fight,” he said.

  Ianthe waited until after Saturday-afternoon choir practice before she went round to Chapter Yard. She washed her hair and put on new black pedal pushers and a big clean white sweatshirt, and when Nicholas opened the door he said, “Wow. Hi,” which was pleasing. In the sitting room, which she could hardly recognize, Leo was in an armchair with his feet on the piano stool, and he looked at her for quite some time before he said, “How very nice.”

  Then he got up and kissed her and offered her a chair and said, amazingly, “How very good to see you.”

  “I’ve been flat-out,” Ianthe said. “I really think we’re beginning to make it. Who’s been at this room?”

  “Mrs. Mop here, alias Nick. I’m scared to dent cushions these days.”

  “Then I know I was right to come,” Ianthe said.

  “What, what—”

  “I’m going to offer your cleaning lady a job.”

  “What!”

  “We’re expanding. We need a dogsbody, messenger, telephone answerer, someone who knows about music. You said Nick wanted an opening in music—”

  “Nick?”

  “Oh I do, oh great, great—”

  “Who’s going to clean the ring off my bath?”

  “You are.”

  “Perhaps I’ll just have a ring. Ianthe, are you serious?”

  “Sure am. We’ve discussed it. Sixty quid a week, free doss on my partner’s sofa—that’s Mike—use of the bike we all share for messages. Can you ride a bike?”

  “I can learn!” Nicholas said. He spun a cushion in the air. “This is great.”

  “What,” said Leo to Ianthe, “has made you so businesslike?”

  “I always was. You just never noticed.”

  “You look different.”

  Ianthe wanted to say did he like it but she thought from his expression that he probably did and anyway he was being so amazingly nice she thought she wouldn’t provoke him.

  “When can I start?” Nicholas said.

  “A week Monday.”

  “This is so good!”

  “Yes,” Leo said, “it is. It’s the one good thing that is happening. Have you heard about the choir?”

  Ianthe rolled her eyes heavenwards.

  “Makes me sick.”

  “In removing Nick, you aren’t only removing my nanny but my lieutenant into the bargain, I hope you know. We’re planning a siege in the choir stalls. Poor Alexander is beside himself.”

  “I can come back,” Nicholas said excitedly, “any time you need me.”

  Leo got up and went across the room to the kitchen.

  “Let’s celebrate with a drink. I’ve even got some wine and these days the odd clean glass—”

  “I say, thanks,” Nicholas said with energy to Ianthe. “Are you sure?”

  She looked airy.

  “Company decision.”

  “Where is the company?”

  “One room, seven floors up, the wrong end of the Charing Cross Road. Well, a room and a half really but the kettle lives in the half.”

  “London,” Nick said.

  “Sure thing. Want a smoke?”

  “No thanks. And don’t here. Leo’ll go bananas.”

  Ianthe considered bravado and decided the atmosphere was too good to waste, so contented herself with chucking the cigarette packet onto the hearthrug to show that she could have smoked if she’d chosen to. Leo came in with the bottle and a handful of glasses and trod on the packet on his passage to his armchair. Nicholas, elated as he couldn’t recall being ever in his life before, got tremendous giggles and began to chuck cushions about.

  “Are you sure you want him?” Leo said to Ianthe.

  She grinned and raised her glass to him.

  “Here’s to the choir.”

  He looked at her.

  “Thank you. And here’s to a glorious future for you two. May you become millionaires.”

  She felt terribly happy, so she got up and kissed Nicholas and then she kissed Leo, and he kissed her back and everything seemed, all of a sudden, just too bloody good to be true.

  8

  SANDRA NOTICED THAT THE HEADMASTER HAD LOST WEIGHT; QUITE a lot, really, for such a big man. It was unfair for him to do it just now, to do something poignant like lose weight out of unhappiness, because Sandra’s boyfriend had recently proposed to her, and although she knew that she and a man like Alexander Troy lived in different worlds and that she would be much happier and more natural with Colin, she could not help her yearning. She liked Colin, loved him even, and certainly approved of his decently acquisitive way of life, but Colin wasn’t admirable or uplifting and certainly never gave her heady seconds of excitement at the set of his shoulders or with particular gestures or inflexions. She had known the proposal was coming for weeks and so, playing the game by the same rules of proper delicacy, had said she would think about it and tell him on Friday. That meant that on Saturday they could buy a ring and announce the engagement ten days later on Sandra’s mother’s birthday. What she must not do, she told herself, was to spend the time until Friday in fruitless anguish for what could not be, nor in bringing in homemade prawn mayonnaise sandwiches—which she knew Alexander loved—to try and persuade him to eat. She was, instead, very businesslike all week, thereby earning from Alexander the warmest gratitude, which did her resolve no good at all.

  It was Sandra who suggested he should go and see the bishop.

  “Remember Mr. Beckford. He’d never be here if it wasn’t for Bishop Robert. My mother disapproves of him because she says you never know which way he’s going to jump, but I think that makes him modern. And he’s really keen on music.”

  She rang the palace and spoke to Janet Young, who
said the bishop was free about five. Then Janet said that if the school had any boys who needed to do something for the good of their souls, the palace herbaceous border would be pleased to see them, and Sandra laughed and said she was welcome to the whole of the fifth year at that rate. At five to five, accompanied by three boys who had been caught smoking with unnecessary defiance in the common room garden under a lilac bush, Alexander crossed the close to the palace and despatched his charges to the border and the bishop’s wife, who, though universally known to be kind, was also universally known to be intolerant of skimped work. From the bishop’s study window, the bishop and the headmaster could watch the culprits weeding away under an eagle eye.

  “She terrifies me in the garden,” the bishop said. “It’s like being a very small boat commanded by a ferocious skipper. Perfectionists can never understand that the rest of us are mere mortals.”

  “They are very lucky to get away so lightly. It exasperates me how much they must show off. As day boys, they have hours and hours in which to misbehave when we have no power to prevent them, but they have to break the rules not only in school but as close to the seat of authority and as publicly as they can.”

  “Perhaps a spell of gardening at the command of a woman is a rather fitting retribution for a display of macho swaggering. Ah, look. They’ve seen us. Poor fellows, spied upon from all sides. Are any of those choristers?”

  “No. Too old. Our oldest is fourteen and that’s about the top limit, really.”

  “I imagine,” the bishop said, guiding Alexander away from the window and towards an elderly chair upholstered in much-washed linen union, “I imagine that the fate of our poor choir is why you have come.”

  “I would only say this to you,” Alexander said, casting himself into the chair, “and in fact it is a huge relief to have someone to say it to, but really I am rather in despair. I don’t quite know where to turn for support. The dean and chapter are apparently five to one in favour of the plan, my common room are twenty-seven to four in favour because it does away with the choir practice priority they all hate so much, and I fear the next governors’ meeting, where the dean and chapter will be present, and so will three city councillors, including Frank Ashworth. It seems to me that unless we make the choir financially self-supporting, we must lose it, and if we lose it, we lose something so precious with it that it hardly bears thinking of.”

  “Is the notion of its being self-supporting impossible?”

  “We aren’t a first-rate choir, we aren’t a Wells; we can’t command the national and international attention they do. Give Leo Beckford enough time and we might be first-rate, I think, although he will always be a better organist than he is a choirmaster, and he is a marvellous organist. But we haven’t got any time. If the choir goes, we will never get it back, certainly never in this ancient, irreplaceable form.”

  He looked across at the bishop, who was swinging his spectacles by one earpiece.

  “Could I—what I want to do is to ask you if you will lend your support to our cause to defend the choir. It would make all the difference.”

  There was a long pause and the bishop put on his spectacles. Then he took them off again and said gently, “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

  “Can’t—”

  “No. I can’t. I would like to—this is in the strictest confidence—but I can’t. Like you, I believe in the unique power of choral music in our cathedrals, but you see, my prime duty and desire is not to this cathedral or to the form of worship in it. It is to the Church. I cannot, you see, provide the spectacle of a divided close at Aldminster for the press to fall eagerly upon. To come out in open opposition to the dean would be the selfish gratification of personal opinion, and would undermine the Church as a whole. We must stand united, for the sake of the people we serve. We diminish the Church in the public eye if we are seen to squabble and wrangle.”

  “But are those very people not diminished if we lose the effect of choral singing in our cathedrals?”

  “They are indeed,” the bishop said, “but less so. Nothing is as damaging as a visibly divided Church, nothing shakes people’s faith so badly.”

  Alexander got up and walked back to the window. Hargreaves, a hugely grown fifteen-year-old exploding out of his uniform, was apparently having a lesson on dead-heading roses. The pruning shears in his hand looked like nail scissors.

  Alexander turned round.

  “It will fall apart. And what about the headmaster’s house?”

  “Now there,” the bishop said with relief, “I am very clear in my mind. It should indeed belong to the city but under the influence of the close. Let it be a meeting place by all means, but a Christian meeting place.”

  “It seems that you agree with me about most aspects of this whole business but you won’t support me.”

  “Can’t as well as won’t. But that doesn’t stop me praying for you. In fact, as old Canon Savile used to say, I’ll pray like blazes.” He stood up. “Alexander, what news of your wife?”

  “None.”

  “How long—”

  “Five weeks.”

  The bishop put the earpiece of his spectacles between his teeth.

  “And will you just wait?”

  “Until the end of term. Then I think I’ve fulfilled my side of our unspoken bargain to allow each other room, and I shall go to look for her.”

  “Women,” the bishop said thoughtfully, “have an extraordinary power, don’t they. It seems to me very real and excellent but not visionary. Is it?”

  “No. Because they aren’t romantic on the whole.”

  “Not romantic?”

  “No. That’s something I learned from Felicity.”

  The bishop said mournfully, “They would make wonderful priests.”

  “But a choir of girls would not have the same almost extravagantly uplifting effect as a choir of boys.”

  The bishop took Alexander’s arm.

  “That particular manifestation of purity, something quite platonic and unearthly, will certainly vanish with the choir.”

  “Don’t speak of it—”

  “All is far from lost, Alexander.”

  “It seems to me at the moment that the opposition to me grows larger every day and I correspondingly shrink.”

  “Nonsense. You are an enormous figure, I often think far too large for Aldminster. Janet says she can see you as a missionary captain of industry and I know exactly what she means. You, with a little help from above, could move mountains and I am not in the least without hope that you will. Do you want to take Janet’s convicts with you or shall we keep them until she’s finished with them?”

  “Oh, keep them, please. This is probably the most constructive hour of Hargreaves’s entire life. He has no idea whatsoever what to do with his ferocious energies and appetites except break things. Furniture simply disintegrates at his approach. Thank you for seeing me.”

  “I shan’t forget any of the things we have talked about.”

  On the doorstep of the palace Alexander turned.

  “Do you think all human endeavour springs from the need to be particular, visible—?”

  “Psychologically speaking, probably. Spiritually speaking, it isn’t necessary.” He glanced up. “There is Bridget Cavendish. Our encounter will not now go unrecorded.”

  Alexander caught Bridget up twenty yards short of the deanery gate. She was wearing an expensive print frock and carrying a wicker basket full of neat paper bags.

  “Just a few salad things,” she said to Alexander. “I can never manage to remember everything at one time.”

  “I don’t think I ever want to see salad again, just now. It’s Mrs. Monk’s sole culinary idea at the moment because it’s June, never mind the actual weather.”

  Bridget beamed.

  “My dear Alexander, you must come in and have supper with the dean and me.”

  “I don’t think—I should, just now.”

  “Nonsense. You ought to hear Hugh’s excel
lent arguments and we could have a sensible discussion in civilized surroundings.”

  Alexander took a step away.

  “I’m not the best of company at the moment—”

  “No, no. I do understand. So wise of you to go and see the bishop.”

  He regarded her with something little short of loathing, bowed, muttered goodbye, and walked rapidly away. She watched him go for a few seconds, then she hurried into the deanery and opened the study door, without knocking.

  “Huffo, I’ve just met Alexander Troy coming out of the palace and he has declined to come and dine with us. He can only have been to see the bishop about his wretched choir—”

  The dean, seated at his desk and writing, did not look up.

  “Not necessarily.”

  “But, Huffo, why else—”

  “Plenty of reasons.”

  “And to refuse my invitation!”

  “Would you expect him to accept it at such a time?”

  “Huffo, I am doing everything in my power to be of service to you in this difficult time—”

  The dean turned round and looked at her over his half-moon spectacles.

  “Then would you be very kind and bring me a cup of tea?”

  Sally worked through the third consecutive lunch hour so as to postpone writing to Alan. Her boss, who was wooing the new young barman in the wine bar in Lydbrook Street, was extravagantly grateful about this and promised to reward her amply in her Friday wage envelope. She was a better salesman than he, in any case, and usually managed to persuade someone who had come in bent upon a copy of Lytton Strachey’s Pope—very rare—to take Elizabeth and Essex—not rare at all—instead and probably a case of unclassified burgundy as well. She also did housewifely things like beeswaxing the backs of the leather-bound books and putting plants about, and old plates picked up in the Thursday antique market, to make the shop alluring to people to whom second-hand book dealers did not normally appeal Twice she wrote “Dear Alan” on pieces of scrap paper, and the third time, “My dear Alan, even if I were not in love with someone else, I don’t want to be married to you anymore,” and tore them all up. It struck her that Alan might be quite relieved to get such a letter, but then she wondered if she just hoped he would be because that would make everything so much easier.