The Choir

by Joanna Trollope

  “It’s quite wrong to favour some children of this city above others. Our policy must be to discourage the rank injustice of privilege.”

  Frank looked at him coolly. He would never have used an emotional word like “rank” himself but he knew an olive branch when he saw one. He gave the education officer the smallest nod and said, “The council much regrets it cannot see its way to taking the choir up. Our feeling is not simply that the money is more needed elsewhere, but that social distinctions in our city only make for trouble, which it is our job, as councillors, to avoid.”

  The theme was taken up eagerly. It was intolerable to encourage twenty-four children to believe themselves in any way superior to any others; choirs were an anachronism, and our heritage was far better represented by the cathedral itself, anyway; religious music was in any case irrelevant in a scientific world and the reality of that had to be confronted. The lay governors pointed out that there was plenty of good music in Aldminster, that there was a first-rate organist, and that the headmaster’s case seemed to be more than a little tenuous.

  “Spiritual!” Canon Yeats cried, helping Alexander not at all.

  “The headmaster is of course musical himself,” the dean said unctuously, “which must needs affect his opinion.”

  “I am a clergyman too—”

  “Should the worship of God be dependent upon music?” the archdeacon asked spitefully.

  Alexander stood up.

  “One of the things I most regret about the debate over the choir which has raged these last months is that it has become personal. We have all become divided from one another because clearly some deep personal chord has been touched in us all, which ironically gives me my only glimmer of hope, namely, that the choir does matter to all of you in some way. All I ask is a reprieve for one year while I try to devise some scheme to save what I earnestly believe we all need”

  The room erupted. The dean let the hubbub swell and bellow for a minute before he called everyone to order.

  “A year! Fifty thousand he’s asking for!”

  The dean raised his hand.

  “Might I suggest a compromise? We do indeed grant a reprieve but not for a year. If Mr. Troy wishes to explore avenues towards making the choir self-financing, I suggest we allow him to produce a viable scheme by the next governors’ meeting. That will be in October, four months away. A fair suggestion, gentlemen, do you not think?”

  Alexander sat down again, heavily, and bowed his head.

  “Four months is no use at all, and you know it.”

  “I think, Mr. Troy, you forget yourself. May I put my proposal to the vote? Those in favour—”

  Hands shot up all round the room, twenty of them.

  “And against.”

  Canon Yeats and Alexander, their hands alone upraised, gazed at each other in despair across the table.

  “You should listen to him,” Canon Yeats said fretfully to the meeting at large, “really you should. It is gravely shortsighted not to.” He looked at Alexander. “ ‘… I am coming to that holy room/ Where, with Thy quire of Saints for evermore,/I shall be made Thy Music …’ ”

  “Herbert,” said the archdeacon know-it-allishly.

  Canon Yeats turned his head.

  “Donne, actually.”

  “Gentlemen—”

  “One moment, Mr. Dean—Mr. Chairman,” Canon Yeats said. “Mr. Troy and myself are about to be heavily outvoted and”—he shot Alexander a glance—“we are not, if Mr. Troy will forgive me, political men, and thus unskilled at, shall we say, manoeuvres, but before we are submerged I must make one thing plain and public and I won’t be talked out of it. And it is this. Ours is the truly Christian point of view and therefore we are right and you may all outvote us until you are blue in the face but you can’t change that.”

  There was a small and embarrassed silence and then, too loudly, “Bravo,” Alexander said.

  After the meeting—concluding with a prayer for unity in which Alexander could not bring himself to join—he went round the table to help Canon Yeats to his feet.

  “Dear me, Mr. Troy, what a den of self-motivated men we have fallen in to be sure.”

  “You did wonderfully.”

  Canon Yeats disentangled his sticks from the chair legs.

  “But it got us nowhere, did it, nowhere at all. It’s all so wrong. I said to my wife only yesterday, you should not run a cathedral as if it were a parish church with the close as its parish. The spiritual responsibility of a cathedral is infinite. Decisions like the choir are not ours to take.”

  Alexander walked slowly beside him out to his waiting car, with its huge orange DISABLED stickers.

  “And don’t you believe them about the money,” Canon Yeats said, at last settled in among his orthopaedic cushions. “That’s just a bluff. Money is always to be found if you put your mind to it.” He looked at Alexander. “Four months, Mr. Troy. Improbable but not impossible. I’m not much use for anything but prayer and addressing envelopes but I’ll do those with a will. Just you say the word.”

  Alexander watched the car hiccup away along the close and then he went slowly back to his office in the school and there, sitting on the edge of Sandra Miles’s desk with both hands round a mug of coffee, was Felicity.

  “It was by the sea,” Felicity said, “not far from Southwold, a tiny community, associated with the one I went to before. Only six nuns and four lay workers running a hospice for dying alcoholics, people picked up in the east coast ports, mostly women. I’ve worked really hard.” She held her hands out. “You wouldn’t believe how much scrubbing there was.”

  They were alone in the sitting room, in the dusk, in chairs Alexander had dragged to the window for the last of the light.

  “I had two hours off each afternoon, and sometimes I went to the sea and walked and sometimes I tried to write and sometimes I found somebody to talk to. I slept in an attic room with another volunteer, which was the worst part, because she had lost a baby not long ago and had come to try and heal herself and she cried terribly in her sleep. And the patients cried and cried too. It isn’t at all a tranquil way to die, even among nuns and Suffolk dunes.”

  Alexander had spent the afternoon with his breath held. He had not dared to ask her anything, had hardly even touched her, in case she either fled again or melted before the intensity of his feeling, like Eurydice. He had, with swimming head, gone through an ordinary afternoon, restraining himself every other minute from leaping up from Livy, Book XXX, with the Lower Sixth to rush and discover if she was still there. She seemed to be, miraculously. He could hear her talking to Sandra, to Mrs. Monk, to Roger Farrell, who had clearly come in to say that yet again Wooldridge had been prevented from turning up for hurdling, and who was being irresistibly deflected from his resentment. Alexander went on with his afternoon with superhuman self-control until Felicity put her head round his study door and said she was going over to the house and she would see him there when he was ready. He managed not to be ready for ten whole minutes.

  “There doesn’t seem to be anything to drink,” she said.

  “There isn’t. I daren’t let there be; otherwise I drank it.”

  “The Cavendishes always have a bursting cellar. I shall go and ask them for a bottle of wine.”

  “Felicity—”

  She smiled at him.

  “Oh, I must. Just think—”

  So she had gone across the close in her flowing black cotton skirt and her fringed shawl and when the dean opened the door she said, “Hugh, I’m afraid it isn’t a cup of sugar I want, but a bottle of wine.”

  The dean quite forgot himself and put his arms round her and said with warmth, “My dear girl—”

  “There isn’t a drop at home. And I’ve been in a little convent where there wasn’t a drop either.”

  The kitchen door opened.

  “Huffo, I heard the knocker—”

  The dean spun round.

  “Look, my dear, look who it is!”

&n
bsp; Bridget came forward battling with a hundred conflicting feelings.

  “My dear Felicity, how perfectly extraordinary—”

  “That I should come back?”

  The dean, beaming, wagged a finger.

  “Now you mustn’t start by calling Bridget’s bluff.”

  “Huffo, I can’t think what you mean—”

  “I’m afraid,” Felicity said, “that I’ve come to scrounge a bottle of wine.”

  “A white burgundy? A blanc de blanc? A hock?”

  “Something very ordinary. You are very kind, Hugh.”

  Bridget was nearly exploding with questions.

  “Are you newly back, Felicity?”

  “Lunchtime. Very travel-stained still. And find you all at each other’s throats.”

  “There have been grave misunderstandings. And some severe overreactions.”

  “I will get your wine,” the dean said hastily, backing away.

  “You must come and see me,” Bridget said. “We must talk it all over sensibly over a cup of coffee. I always feel women are so much better at sorting things out. So much less emotional.”

  “I’ve spent the last six weeks with women. I should say they were very emotional indeed.” She looked clearly at Bridget. “I’ve been helping to nurse dying drunks in Suffolk. Women drunks. I didn’t intend to.” She paused. “I thought you would like to know.”

  “My dear—”

  “Here,” said the dean, returning, “a bottle of nice white burgundy. A present from me—us. To celebrate your return.”

  “I didn’t mean it to be a present.”

  “But I do.”

  When she had gone, Bridget said furiously, “You are such a fool, Huffo. And you make such a fool of me.”

  He regarded her.

  “Do I now, my dear.”

  “There,” Felicity said, holding the bottle out to Alexander.

  “But that’s good!”

  “I know. Hugh gave it to us.”

  “But Bridget—”

  They laughed, for the first time.

  “As you can imagine.”

  She came up to him and laid her cheek against his chest. He did not touch her. Then she said, “Shall we drink it? In the sitting room without putting the lights on?” And when they were there, she told him what she had already told Bridget Cavendish. He said at the end, quite openly, “And why did you leave it and come back?”

  “To be with you.”

  She held her glass up to the dying light.

  “I don’t go away to be perverse.”

  “Then why?”

  “I feel compelled.”

  “Are you sure it is not just a test? A test of yourself? To see if you really do still want to live with me?”

  “If that is so, then every time I find I do. This time more strongly than usual.” She looked directly at him. “I can’t promise it won’t happen again, any more than one can promise never to let another row start, but I will try. I don’t want it to happen again.”

  “And if I were to leave you?”

  “I should not be as forbearing as you are with me. Do you want to leave?”

  He swallowed.

  “No. I never have. I—”

  She said quickly, “Don’t mention God.”

  He waited.

  “There is so much to reconcile,” Felicity said. “I never thought living could be so hard, wherever you do it. At least I think I’m learning that no other place is less hard and that if I am with you, it’s easier. But it doesn’t stop the pressures, all the demands like a Henry James novel, all the oughts and the wants. I am a rotten wife.”

  “Only in the clean-sock, marmalade-making sense, and I don’t mind about that anyway. I only mind about separation and exclusion.”

  “I know.” She paused. “I will try. I want to try. I am going to write so much down. And read. Sister Winifred at the convent said I should start with Saint Benedict.”

  “Perhaps—”

  “Are you hungry?”

  He thought about it.

  “Not really.”

  “I expect there are eggs—”

  “Later.”

  She got up and filled their glasses.

  “Tell me what has been happening. Sandra told me about the choir and that you are beleaguered alone because for some reason even Leo won’t speak to you. Poor Sandra. She showed me her ring so sadly. You’ve taught her the ultimate dreariness of good sense.”

  “Come here,” he said.

  She folded herself up on the floor by his chair and leaned against his knees.

  “You remember little Henry Ashworth?”

  “Yes. A dear, straightforward fellow, lovely voice—”

  “Leo is besotted with his mother and planning to marry her. As yet not even Henry’s father knows.”

  “Frank Ashworth’s son—”

  “Yes. And Frank Ashworth is pushing to buy this house from the dean and chapter to make into a social centre.”

  “This house?”

  “This house. I have been given four months to make the choir financially self—supporting. I ran a petition in the city which raised nearly two thousand signatures, but no-one was prepared to give any money. I suppose I must now appeal nationally.”

  “Heavens,” Felicity said. “Heavens. I think I should go back to my drunks.”

  “Not funny.”

  She got up.

  “How right you are. They weren’t. I know Sally Ashworth.”

  “You do?”

  “I’ve bought lots of books from Quentin Small—”

  “Will you talk to her?”

  “I might think she was right.”

  “But Henry—”

  “I might still think it. But I’ll talk to her. And Leo has sent you to Coventry because you disapprove.”

  “Coventry became sort of mutual. And as Canon Yeats so rightly said, I’m no politician, I don’t know how to manoeuvre people.”

  “You’re honest.”

  “And clumsy?”

  She put out a hand to pull him to his feet.

  “Any squeak from Daniel?”

  “None.”

  “Oh dear,” she said, putting her arm through his, “how unstraightforward everything about us is—”

  He smiled down.

  “You’re a fine one to talk.”

  She smiled back.

  “Hello,” she said.

  He stooped to give her a quick kiss.

  “Come on,” he said, “eggs.”

  10

  SALLY BELIEVED HER VISIT TO HER MOTHER HAD CLEARED HER mind. Jean Jefferies was a widow and lived in the village she had lived in all her married life. She had a dog, a garden, a bridge four, and an old schoolfriend to go on holiday with to the Scilly Isles. She was a keen patron of the mobile library, kept binoculars on the sitting-room windowsill for bird watching, and, having voiced her objection to Alan as Sally’s husband just once, on grounds of class, she had never mentioned it again nor held it against him. She had been brought up not to hold personal opinions about people and her term of highest approbation was “sensible.” Sally’s proposal to leave Alan and all he could provide her with for a bohemian organist earning rather under thirteen thousand all told was not sensible at all.

  “It isn’t about money,” Sally said.

  When she talked like that, Sally reminded Jean of her dead father. They had married at the end of the war and too late discovered that they had nothing in common outside the set of friends that had brought them together. Graham had always gone on about communication being so important, but in Jean’s view, communication was the exchange of reasonable opinion and pieces of information and no more. Graham used to tell her often—and not pleasantly—that she had no imagination, but she never minded. Imagination, as far as she could see, only led its possessors into terrible pointless labyrinths of talk and feeling that were a pure waste of time. It was stupid to let yourself get upset, as Graham always was, because then you became paralys
ed and could do nothing for hours. Many a weekend afternoon, she could recall, she had weeded an entire border while Graham fumed about uselessly indoors after some silly tiff they’d had at lunchtime. And now here was Sally all agitated because she couldn’t for the moment fix her mind on the obvious and the prudent.

  “It will pass,” Jean said. “Everyone gets the fidgets. It’s usually about forty but perhaps you are having them early. Don’t give him biscuit, dear, or he asks all visitors.”

  “He’d better have that bit, he’s licked it—”

  Jean shooed the terrier into his basket and came back to say, “You know me, dear. I’ll speak my mind just once. If you’ve come to get my approval, you can’t have it. Your father and I were very poorly suited and we managed thirty very decent years. I am sure Alan’s been silly, men often are and it means nothing, but he’s your husband and that’s that. It’s time he came home and you lived together as a proper family. And you have Henry. What would have become of you if I had decided to pack up and walk out because I didn’t like the argy-bargy?”

  “I expect I’d have had a much more relaxed childhood.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  “Oh, Mum—”

  “I don’t want this to become personal, Sally, but people don’t marry musicians.”

  “Presumably Lady Elgar did, and several Frau Bachs—”

  “You know exactly what I mean. Being an organist is arty, Sally, it isn’t reliable. What kind of home would you have?”

  “A very crooked cottage in Chapter Yard.”

  “And Henry?”

  “Things wouldn’t change for Henry except he’d have a stepfather he saw all the time rather than an absent father.”

  “So your mind’s made up.”

  “Almost—”

  “You would have to get more than a fiddling-around job.”

  “It would be good for me.”

  “Well,” Jean said, “you’re my daughter and always will be, whatever we do or don’t agree about. If you go ahead, you’ll know what my opinion is, but no-one else will. You’d better send Henry here for a bit of fishing with his granny. It’ll do him more good to talk fish than feelings.”

  “And Leo? Will you meet Leo?”

  “Of course. But I’m not turning my back on Alan either. Now that’s enough of that. You can come out and help me tie up the delphiniums. Poor things, this wind has knocked them flat.”