The Choir

by Joanna Trollope

They made a list of who else they could ask. Felicity said she would try shops and banks and the legion of building societies on the Lyng who owed them money morally, she said, for filling precious ground floor windows with insufferable yellow-and-blue placards about interest rates. And she would put an appeal in the paper. Ianthe said, embarrassedly, that her father would have to know.

  “There’s a facility fee. The dean and chapter would charge one, Leo says—”

  “But he says he’ll waive his own fees and if we don’t need the whole choir, only Henry—”

  “What about the Musicians’ Union?”

  “Henry doesn’t belong and I suppose it’s up to Leo what he does with his fee—”

  “I can design the sleeve,” Ianthe said. “That would save a couple of hundred—”

  “And the royalty?”

  “Ten or fifteen per cent—”

  Nicholas said sadly, “My dears, ten per cent of a thousand records selling for six pounds can’t save the choir.”

  “But it’s a beginning! It might get them known!”

  “If it’s promoted as a save-this-choir record, if we really wham in on the publicity—”

  “Do you know about publicity?”

  “A bit—”

  “Look,” Alexander said. “I don’t want to be an old killjoy, but I really think you are going to be badly disappointed. I’ve got an appointment to see a King’s old boy next week who is reputed to be musical and wealthy, and dull though it may sound, I think that sort of chance is our only real one for the money we need.”

  Nicholas’s face was contorted with the effort of making Alexander see.

  “We’ve got to try—”

  Alexander smiled.

  “Oh, what a bunch of amateur enthusiasts—”

  “Steady on,” Ianthe said, but her indignation was mock. “Some of us round here are in the business.” She stopped. “I suppose my father could just refuse to let us use the cathedral?”

  Alexander began to laugh.

  “Ianthe, I think we look such a hopeless star-gazing crew that he’d think himself perfectly safe.”

  “Great oaks—” Felicity said. She looked round at them all and smiled hugely.

  “Hadn’t someone better ask little Henry?”

  Back Street depressed Sally. There was no humanity left in it now, where once there had been so much—strings of washing and prize leeks and doorstep natters and pay-night feuds. Only four little terraced houses were left, clinging together, dwarfed by the blocks of flats and offices with alarming leggy car-park spaces underneath, and they looked toothless and seedy. The new buildings had made a wind tunnel, and grimy blasts from the docks blew the litter about waist high. Sally thought that if one of the little houses still standing had been Frank’s birthplace, he would be living in it still, with his books and his refrigerator and his record player all crammed into rooms still wearing the last coat of distemper his father had slapped on to them. Traditional, tough, soft-hearted, and progressive—in all, Sally considered, riding up in the lift, twice the man his son would ever be.

  When he opened his front door, Sally said, “Shall we both apologize or shall neither of us?”

  “You ought to know better than to ask me that.”

  “Can I come in?”

  He made way for her. The big table in his sitting room was strewn with papers and the “Anvil Chorus” was thumping out of the record player. He turned it off and said, “Did Henry give you my message?”

  “He said you’d been up to the school—”

  Sally sat down at the table and put her elbows on it.

  “Frank, I’ve come to tell you something. I’m leaving Alan.”

  He said nothing.

  “I can’t live like this anymore, on the coat tails of someone else’s life. We hardly know each other anymore and I don’t think I’m interested, either. I don’t trust him and even if I’m quite fond of him, I don’t love him. He isn’t my companion.” She was on the verge of saying, “I’m sorry, Frank,” but she quelled it and said instead, “I wrote to him yesterday.”

  Frank went over to the imitation Jacobean sideboard that he had given his mother ten years before she died because she had craved it so, and poured brandy into glasses. He put one in front of Sally.

  “I can’t drink it without soda—”

  He went back silently and shot soda into the tumbler; then he gave it to Sally and sat down opposite her.

  “Now then. What’s brought all this on?”

  “It’s been coming on a long while.”

  “He’s not much of a husband,” Frank said, “and he’s never been good enough for you. But I don’t think he’s any worse than he’s ever been—”

  “It isn’t him, it’s me.”

  Frank looked at her.

  “What’s happened to you?”

  “I’ve changed. Things have come to a head—”

  “Another fellow?”

  “A friend has made me see clearly. That’s all.”

  Frank grunted.

  “Girls like me,” Sally said, “got married because that was the next thing we did. Our mothers didn’t work; we weren’t brought up to think long-term. But I can’t mark time like this for the rest of my life. I’m only thirty-four.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Live by myself for a bit and work seriously.”

  “How are you going to manage that?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  He looked up.

  “Did you think I’d help you?”

  “No.”

  “I might.”

  “Frank—”

  “Women have to earn their way same as any man now. Their choice. What about Henry?”

  “He doesn’t know anything yet.”

  Frank got up and walked to the window to look up with reluctant admiration at the cathedral. When Gwen had come to him saying she was going off with Peter Mason and she’d like to dare to see him try and stop her, he hadn’t wanted to stop her at all. He believed that secretly she had wanted a scene, had wanted to see two huge men hurling punches at each other over her like some Hollywood movie, because she grew even angrier with him when he took it calmly, and clutched little Alan passionately against her and made silly and extravagant declarations that served no purpose except to frighten the child. The last thing Gwen wanted was her own life; she wanted to be at the cosy and cosseted centre of someone else’s, and that’s what she insisted on with Peter Mason, chocolates and dinner dances and champagne, and sprays of mauve orchids on their numerous sentimental little anniversaries. She was light-years away from Sally, gazing with distaste at her brandy and talking about freedom and making it alone. Whether Gwen had really wanted to take Alan with her was doubtful too, apart from the image of sweet motherhood he allowed her to convey; probably a poodle puppy would have served much the same purpose. Frank was sure no-one ever tried to explain things to Alan—not Gwen or him or Peter Mason, who proved a kindly, indulgent stepfather. They just let these things happen to Alan and he got on with the results. He turned round.

  “What will you say to him?”

  “I’ll say I don’t want to live as his father’s wife anymore because we never see each other and we are too far apart. I’ll tell him he won’t understand now but he will later. I’ll tell him I’ll answer any question he wants to ask me. I won’t say anything until I’ve seen Alan.”

  “Have you asked him to come back?”

  “I haven’t asked him anything.”

  Frank let out a long sigh. He moved behind Sally’s chair and gave her shoulder the lightest touch as he passed.

  “I’m sorry, Sally. I’m in no position to offer advice and I wouldn’t anyhow. But don’t rush into anything. And if you need help, you know where I am.”

  “Damn,” Sally said, “I’m going to cry—”

  “No, you’re not. Not in here.”

  She flung her head up.

  “I’m so full of my own problems I never as
ked you about yours.”

  He said from the far side of the room, “Mine? Well, I’ve been sitting here recovering from being made a public fool of.”

  “Frank!”

  “I was led by the nose by the dean. I believed I was trading a chance to buy the headmaster’s house for supporting him in abolishing the choir. No such thing. He’s been supported all round the houses by close and council and school, and thus I end up with egg on my face in the chamber and a chance in a thousand now of getting their support on the house. So the dean gets rid of the choir and keeps the house. I lose the reputation of thirty years.”

  Sally got up and crossed the room to him.

  “Frank, no, you haven’t, it’s too big a reputation for that—”

  “Size makes no difference. You can lose the biggest reputation in the world in three seconds if your enemies have a mind to it. I know I sound bitter. I am bitter. But I’ll pull up.” He looked at Sally. “You’ve a lot to learn about being alone.”

  She went down in the lift to the street and found a parking ticket on her windscreen, which filled her with rage because the street was empty, unused at this time of day, and she had been in nobody’s way. She wrote furiously on the ticket, “Use our money to fine people who are really at fault,” shoved it back into its plastic envelope and drove back past the council offices to push it through the public letter box. This was partially soothing, although she would really have liked to scream at a traffic warden as well. Then she drove on to Blakeney Street and parked the car, and let herself into the house to find Henry, who had been brought home by Mrs. Chilworth, sitting on the floor watching television and eating spaghetti hoops out of a tin with a fork.

  11

  THE PROPOSITION TO MAKE A RECORD IN AN ATTEMPT TO RESCUE the choir filled Hugh Cavendish with a quite disproportionate fury. He disliked open defiance in his close; he abhorred the giant and ill-controlled passions of men like Alexander Troy; he was offended by the crude amateurishness of the scheme and saw the cathedral’s own sacred dignity as being affronted by it too. Felicity’s return—and the dean was particularly annoyed with her because he knew himself to be susceptible to her personality—had given the whole business a new lease of life at precisely the moment when it had seemed that all vital controls were slipping comfortably into his hands. The business of the choir had successfully deflected public attention from the new lighting scheme, and support for the immense repairs was almost unquestioned; they had even taken on a new apprentice in the cathedral works yard on the strength of donations pouring in and the promise of substantial grants. Then the council had laughed at the notion of taking on the choir, which was precisely what was wanted, as the dean wished it to go but also needed to have been seen to attempt to save it. And then Felicity Troy had come back.

  He told himself that he did not care for her opinion any more than he cared for the organist’s or the singing boys’ and men’s or even the bishop’s, for that matter. Ancient English dioceses were poorly served, in his view, by men like Robert Young, who, however good, had had their view of the pure and ancient doctrinal tradition of the Church damaged by long service overseas. Hugh Cavendish knew the bishop privately did not support him, and even though he had expected this, it was more disturbing when it happened than he would have liked. As for Leo, the frail camaraderie that they had built up over the restoration of the organ seemed to have disintegrated entirely, and, what was worse, the animosity between Leo and the headmaster, whatever its cause, which had looked so very promising to his purpose, seemed to be much diminished.

  To have, in the midst of all this, Ianthe and that hopeless boy they had all put themselves out for, so far to no avail, coming to him to ask him to waive the customary facility fee for recording in the cathedral was the last straw. He had lost his temper. No, he had said, he would waive nothing. He would require a fee of three hundred pounds to be put into the lighting fund, and in any case he very much doubted that in the busy summer months, three consecutive evenings could be found for recording. The engineers were all working late in the light season, and they could not possibly be halted; they were the priority. Ianthe had been very rude to him. She had called him a hypocrite and a dog in the manger. When they left him after this disagreeable interview, he found that he was trembling.

  He looked down at his desk. Nicholas had left a list there of the music Henry Ashworth was going to sing. “Greensleeves” of course, and some Florentine carnival song and a shepherd boy’s song from the Auvergne and a whole lot of other sentimental rubbish. They proposed to make a single, whatever that was, of the shepherd’s song. It was a scheme quite mortifying in its silliness and doomed to disaster by the sheer incompetent inexperience of the promoters. Why then, he pondered, did it make him so angry, if indeed it could not possibly represent a threat? What was there in the sheer energy of their enthusiasm that nauseated him so much? He roamed up and down his study while Benedict watched him uneasily from the hearth rug. He must not lose control, either of the close or his temper; he must never forget for one moment that he owed, rightly, everything he could give to the sustaining and enrichment of the cathedral. He picked up the telephone and dialled the cathedral architect.

  “Mervyn?”

  “Ah! Dean, good morning—”

  “Can I trouble you for something?”

  Mervyn always made a spinsterish fuss about his busyness. “Of course, Dean, I’m only too pleased but of course I am simply rushed off my feet just now—”

  “Only a valuation—”

  “A valuation?”

  “Could you organize it for me? For the headmaster’s house. There is no need to say anything to anyone of this. If you see Mr. or Mrs. Troy, you might say it was routine.”

  There was a pause.

  “Dean, I shouldn’t like not to be open—”

  “My dear fellow, it is your estimates that are giving us these financial headaches. Three years’ worth of stone-masonry for the parapets alone! I am merely exploring every avenue, you understand. Of course I should always prefer to beg and borrow than sell, but people eventually get to the bottom of their pockets, you know.”

  “Quite—”

  “Could you do it in the next week?”

  “I can’t promise, Dean, though naturally I will do my best—”

  “Thank you, Mervyn. Thank you.”

  “Dean, I think I should tell you that I met your daughter and a friend talking to John—in the works yard. They were apparently in search of a platform of some kind to stand a chorister on for a recording. I wonder if you—”

  “I know all about it,” the dean said. “It’s some childish scheme. Please don’t give them any help.”

  “Oh, Dean, I shouldn’t, but I think John—”

  “I will speak to John.”

  At lunch Bridget was in a strange and noble mood. She helped out his quiche and salad and filled his water glass with a kind of high-minded solicitude, and only when they were peeling apples for dessert afterwards did she make a stately speech about feeling herself to be torn between a wife’s natural duty and a mother’s love.

  “I suppose,” the dean said, “you mean Ianthe’s nonsense over this record.”

  “Her heart is in it, Huffo.”

  “My name is Hugh. If her head were in it, the scheme might have the smallest chance of succeeding. As it is, she will make a great fool of herself, and of the close too, if we are not careful. You cannot possibly think she is right.”

  “She talked to me in the kitchen. She talked to me of the soul of the cathedral.”

  The dean put down his apple.

  “I too have talked to you of the soul of the cathedral. The difference between us is that I am very clear as to what I mean by it. Ianthe is blown hither and thither by her emotions. No doubt this current silliness is an attempt to ingratiate herself with Leo Beckford.”

  “At least,” Bridget cried, “I can say I know my children! You are so hard, Huffo, so unforgiving—”

&nbs
p; “No doubt,” the dean said, “no doubt that is how you wish to see it.” He got up. “If you will forgive me, I must get on. I will leave you to contemplate the anguish of your position.”

  Alexander travelled up to London in a very different mood from the one in which he had gone to seek Felicity. He could not precisely justify his buoyancy, but the mood in the close had so lifted since her return, and the tide of opinion had so swung in the choir’s favor, that he felt it only right to trust in his confident instincts. He wore his dog collar for psychological reasons—a banker in a bronze glass eyrie in Bishopsgate would find him difficult to refuse, thus dressed—but he bought a Private Eye to read on the train and treated himself to a taxi to take him to the City.

  The old King’s boy, new director of the corporate banking division of a huge Anglo-American conglomerate, greeted him on the sixth floor in a panelled reception area hushed by the depth of its carpet. The receptionist looked like someone’s extremely expensive but reliable wife, and brought them coffee in bone china cups. They sat in a room lined with prints of ships in pewter frames, furnished with the kind of impeccable reproduction furniture Alexander associated with the third floor of Harrods, and looking over the City’s curious cubist horizon to the consoling dome of St. Paul’s.

  Paul Downey made benign small talk about his time at King’s. No, he had not been a chorister, too interested in chasing balls of various sorts, he was afraid, and no, he hadn’t been back to Aldminster since he left, though of course he’d always meant to …

  “School mythology claims you as musical,” Alexander said, smiling.

  Paul Downey looked abruptly portentous and said, “Opera.”

  So Felicity was right. “You’ll find it’s opera he claims to love,” she had said when she heard he was a banker. “It goes with backgammon and skiing in Verbier and handmade shoes. It’s part of proving they aren’t only obsessed with money. It’s terribly chic to love opera.”

  He had been amazed.

  “How do you know such things?”

  “Malicious observation and reading Mrs. Monk’s newspaper.”

  “I love opera too,” Alexander said now, to Paul Downey. “I just wish that our wonderful strain of music attracted the money that opera does.”