The Choir

by Joanna Trollope

  “Cathedrals do a wonderful job.”

  Alexander leaned forward.

  “If I can’t raise at least the promise of fifty thousand by October, our choir won’t have a job to do at all, wonderful or not.”

  Paul Downey slid a stiff white envelope from the inside pocket of his admirable suit.

  “I rather gathered that from your letter. I have worked out some figures because, as you surmised, we do have a charitable fund to draw upon. Let me explain it to you. Our aim is philanthropic and most of our interest is in medical research. We are major contributors to research into heart disease—”

  Alexander’s eyes dropped involuntarily to the prosperous curve of Paul Downey’s waistcoat. With difficulty he restrained himself from saying that such support seemed to him hardly altruistic.

  “—and cancer of course, and naturally our Third World lending carries an impressive programme of aid projects with it. I am in a rather delicate position, as I am sure you will appreciate, as the claims of the choir at Aldminster must seem a very personal request to my fellow board members. But they have reacted very well, I think. A loan was considered too complicated to arrange on account of its security, but they are pleased to make a gift—of five thousand pounds.”

  Alexander got up quickly to take his dismay to the window and the prospect of St. Paul’s. Behind him, Paul Downey said in his even, reasonable voice, “You see, it was felt that your choir, however valid to its city, has a very local claim. We feel it very much our duty to put money into schemes of at least national and at best international significance. You were most eloquent in your letter about cathedral music, but that is of course your personal enthusiasm. I should feel the same if they tried to axe the chorus at Covent Garden. I do hope you appreciate our point of view.”

  There was a silence while Alexander wrestled with himself and then he turned and said with a clumsiness he could not help and much regretted, “Could you not, as an old boy, help us privately, even just to help us raise a loan?”

  Paul Downey looked extremely serious.

  “Oh no, Mr. Troy. I couldn’t do that.”

  “Then I must thank you sincerely for your gift and return to Aldminster.”

  Paul Downey rose.

  “I wish we could have done more but our responsibilities are—global.”

  “Are there any other old boys you can think of who might feel less—detached, shall we say?”

  Paul shook his head.

  “I’m afraid I have lost touch with almost all of my contemporaries. Regrettable I know, but the pressures of life simply don’t allow me the time any longer.”

  In the silent lift dropping him down to street level, Alexander gazed with loathing at the blond suede with which it was lined. Above him and walking swiftly back to his office, Paul Downey reflected for two minutes upon the calibre of Church of England clergymen, and upon how easy it apparently was to lose one’s sense of proportion living in a provincial town, before his secretary met him and said his call to Tokyo was on the line and waiting.

  Alexander’s journey home was in some ways quite as depressing as the last one. That brief brush with the huge, impersonal outside world had only served to make his own cause the more hopeless. However insulated in his own world, Paul Downey’s view of the cathedral close at Aldminster—admirable, excellent, worthy, but small, a spot of local bother—was perfectly genuine. He could, he supposed, trail round from company to company, cap in hand, but he would never raise enough to secure the choir’s future, and he would half kill himself in self-abasement to achieve it. It was salutary but profoundly discouraging to see his cause as others saw it, and he must make use of the lesson, if he possibly could. If the outside world couldn’t, with the best will in the world, see the size of the problem, then the inside world of Aldminster must be made to.

  Speech Day at the King’s School dawned dull but dry. By noon the classrooms, laboratories, studios, and workshops were filled with parents stooping dutifully to admire Metalwork Job One and violent graphics for the covers of imaginary magazines. The tradition was for picnic lunches to be brought and eaten beneath the trees of the playing fields—an immense gastronomic competitiveness had arisen over this in recent years—while Roger Farrell’s gymnastic squad performed in the centre of the field, and the school military band oompahed from the terrace below the main building. After lunch, parents were herded into the vast Victorian Gothic school hall and seated in obedient rows beneath the massive red timbers of the vaulted roof. On the dais, a table bearing all the books to be given as prizes stood in front of the phalanx of governors, the headmaster, and the guest of honour, an old boy who had become a nationally known hero of the Falklands war. The boys, and the sixth form girls, sat unnaturally subdued among their parents, gazing ahead at the extravagant pedestal of orange and yellow flowers that Sandra Miles had ordered for the dais and had known to be a mistake the moment it arrived. Alexander had told her it looked very jolly and Felicity had very kindly not mentioned it at all.

  The headmaster, it was apparent to everyone in the hall, was in a mood of exaltation. He was always big; today he seemed immense. He exuded a huge vitality and benevolence. For most of the parents this was extremely promising, since, living locally, they were well aware of the schism in the Close, and their opinion was almost exclusively divided depending on their own children’s aptitudes. The parents of musicians and arts-oriented pupils smiled upon Alexander; those with sons and daughters who were gifted athletes and physicists scowled. Alexander, oblivious of everything except his passionate belief in what he was going to say and the optimism that had been swelling in him since Felicity’s return, rose to give his annual address. The audience, well trained, waited for the traditional recital of the school’s achievements over the year.

  “The cathedrals of France,” Alexander said unexpectedly, “some of the most beautiful of the cathedrals in the Western world, are silent.”

  The faint rustlings in the hall died abruptly away.

  “There are organs, to be sure, and piped music. But there are no choirs. In twenty-seven English cathedrals, on between four and six occasions every week, you may hear sung offices, a sound not just unique in itself, but one that takes us back down an unbroken musical line to Thomas à Becket, to Saint Augustine.”

  Mr. Vigors, the deputy headmaster, leaned forward slightly to give the smallest recollecting nudge to the sheet of school statistics he had, as in every other year, prepared meticulously for the headmaster. Alexander gave Mr. Vigors a warm smile and returned the paper exactly to its original position.

  “Without the choir of boys’ voices, that particular sound, a sound of unrivalled beauty and power, would not be possible. For five hundred years, music has been composed to that top line of extraordinary sound, and it is in English cathedrals alone that it remains still uncorrupted, strong and free, with a higher standard of voice being recruited every year.”

  From the twelfth row, Sally observed Hugh Cavendish, two seats away from the headmaster, recross his legs with tremendous deliberation. She looked down at Henry. He didn’t look back; he was listening.

  “If there is privilege in the subject of English choral music, it is ours, the listeners’. No boy is barred from this choir in Aldminster because he cannot pay the fees. But if we lose the choir, we not only damage our souls, our inner selves, call it what you will, but we also deprive the future both of something so precious and ancient it is not ours to destroy, and of something the future may long, quite justifiably, to preserve. What we lose in breaking a hitherto unbroken tradition we may never have again. And yet”—his voice rose—“and yet in this cathedral close there is at present a proposal to do exactly that.”

  There was by now a distinct agitation on the platform. Alexander turned to either side, his gown swirling, as if to still a swelling storm. His voice grew stronger.

  “This threat is just the beginning. A change of government may well pose a much greater danger. But if we do not be
gin fighting now, we will be unprepared when the battle becomes a war. May I remind you that the first protocol of the European Convention of Human Rights declares that the State must respect the right of all parents to ensure that the education and training of their children conforms to their own religious and philosophical convictions. Many of you, when asked off-the-cuff, might declare you think choral music irrelevant, but I believe that upon reflection almost every one of you would defend to the last the pure clear atmosphere of educational choice and opportunity. Music is one of those choices. I am not alone in believing it to be a vital one.”

  He glanced at Mr. Vigors and smiled again.

  “I am almost done. I must be plain with you. To save this choir for a year alone, this choir which comprises twenty-four boys from this school and twelve lay clerks, of whom three were once pupils here and all of whom live in or near this city, we need fifty thousand pounds by next October. We are making a record and we need three thousand pounds to launch that alone. We are organizing summer concerts in the city. We are holding a sponsored hymn-singing marathon in the hall here two days before the end of term. We need your help. We need donations, we need fund-raising events. We need publicity. Every year one or two of our thirty-seven choirs and choir schools goes to the wall, but Aldminster shall not be among them. Together we will ensure that for as long as we are alive to achieve it, the King’s School shall send its singing boys to the cathedral as it has done these four hundred years.”

  He stopped. Hugh Cavendish had his eyes closed. The archdeacon’s face was working furiously. Alexander picked up Mr. Vigors’s sheet of paper.

  “Now then. To the school’s other triumphs. An unprecedented enthusiasm for further education has, I am delighted to say, resulted in an equally unprecedented number of university places—”

  Sally looked down at Henry again. She whispered, “What did you think of that?”

  “Superb,” he said. “Brilliant,” and he swiveled in his seat to catch Chilworth’s eye four rows behind him. Together, they jabbed their thumbs jubilantly into the air.

  “I could of course say nothing this afternoon in public,” Hugh Cavendish wrote to Alexander Troy that evening in a hand-delivered note, “but in my view and in that of most of the governors to whom I have spoken since, your speech today was no more than the grossest abuse of your position. Nobody knows better than you that the decision over the abolition of the choir was taken with the most profound regret and solely—this I must emphasize—for the sake of the preservation of the cathedral, whose maintenance must be of paramount importance. The intemperance of your speech serves only to create disunity in a school and city where everyone else is striving to achieve an essential harmony. I am grieved beyond measure that you should have taken the arbitrary decision to speak without even the courtesy of consulting the governing body first. In the governors’ opinion, the only reparation possible for today’s damaging episode is for you to issue an apology to all parents, to be sent out with the school reports, in which you pledge your loyalty to the governing body. Without that, I can only fear that the certainty of your remaining headmaster at the King’s School becomes doubtful.”

  “Read that,” Alexander said, tossing the letter across to Felicity. He had taken his dog collar off and was sitting in an open-necked shirt in the garden of the headmaster’s house with her, while the blue dusk thickened round them.

  She held the letter up to the light spilling out of the sitting-room window.

  “Silly man,” she said. “You should never write letters in such a temper.”

  “I frequently do—”

  “He’s threatening you with dismissal unless you climb down. He seems to forget that the school thrives under you. I wonder what has touched him so very much on the raw?”

  Alexander yawned.

  “His close. His cathedral.”

  “You seem awfully calm. Usually a letter like that has you spinning about in a bellowing fury.”

  “Well,” Alexander said, “five fathers wrote us cheques there and then. I couldn’t count the number of mothers offering to hold things and sell things. And the choir themselves were being chaired round the cricket pitch—”

  “And the common room,” Felicity said. “I can’t get over it. The Farrell faction dwindled to a handful in tracksuits—”

  “That’s John Godwin’s doing.”

  “Nonsense. It was your speech.”

  “It was self-interest. They don’t want to see the school lose face or status, because it’s catching.”

  “Nonsense. It was your speech—”

  “Am I interrupting?” Leo said from the garden door.

  “My dear fellow. Not at all. Did you hear—”

  Leo stooped to kiss Felicity.

  “Did I hear! The close is absolutely humming and the Echo wants to print your speech. You aren’t answering your telephone so they rang me. That’s why I’ve come.”

  “Excellent.”

  “And the dean?”

  Felicity held out the letter.

  “See for yourself.”

  “I’m going to get us all a drink,” Alexander said. “At least I am going to see if there is something to drink and if there is, we’ll drink it.”

  “I’m glad to see you here,” Felicity said to Leo.

  He looked up from the letter.

  “You went to see Sally.”

  She nodded.

  “Have you made it up?”

  “No. That’s another reason I’m here. I can’t be on non-speaks with everyone. I began to feel like some kind of pariah.”

  “Sally must take it all seriously. For everyone’s sake. You must see that.”

  “Are you suggesting that I’m not serious? That I’m just flirting? For Christ’s sake, I want to marry the woman. She says no-one has ever given her the belief in herself that I have. And what does she do with that self-confidence? Brandish it at me and say she isn’t at all sure she wants any husband, just her own life.”

  Felicity said, “You must wait.”

  Alexander came jubilantly out into the garden.

  “Will you look at this?”

  He dropped a bottle of whisky in Felicity’s lap.

  “It was on the kitchen table. There was a note saying, ‘To Mr. Troy with all good wishes from M. and B. Harrison.’ Their boy is a chorister. They run an off-licence in Horsley. What a lovely tribute.”

  “You shouldn’t drink it,” Felicity said teasingly. “It’s another seven pounds for the cause—”

  “If it wasn’t for tomorrow,” Alexander said, “and assembly and an A-level Greek set before nine o’clock, I should drink every last drop.”

  “And this letter?”

  Alexander plucked the bottle out of Felicity’s lap and brandished it.

  “I shall leave that,” he said grandly, “to assume its proper perspective.”

  The junior chamber of commerce of Aldminster, meeting for its regular luncheon session in a private room at the Stag’s Head—renowned in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for the Stag’s Head Flyer, the fastest post-chaise to London from the west country —found that every one of its members but three had been approached for money for the choir fund and had succumbed. The three who had not, discovered that they felt rather aggrieved at being omitted, and two resolved there and then to send unsolicited cheques that afternoon. They were nearly all small private enterprises and chafed under the rule of a Labour council—at least a new-style Labour council, since admiration for Frank Ashworth remained almost universal—and their generosity had something of a political edge, as well as a sympathetic understanding of David’s relation to Goliath. It appeared too that the dean was not much liked. His rods, his wine, his manner, his wife, were all stumbling blocks. He was, someone said, too grand for Aldminster.

  The article from the Echo on Alexander’s speech had been read by almost all of them. Even if most of them would instinctively have preferred to listen to Frankie Vaughan or Sir Harry Secombe, t
hey felt a swelling of civic pride that a record should be made of a boy chorister who had been born in the city hospital and who had lived and been educated in the city ever since. Felicity had traded heavily on that on her vast circle of visits, telling her potential donors that the money was going into a three-thousand-pound fund for an immediate use, rather than a fifty-thousand-pound one for a less identifiable future. It had taken her only a week to raise the money for the record.

  “The funny thing is,” she said to the wine bar owner in Lydbrook Street who had, to her surprise and delight, written out a cheque for a hundred pounds, “that I simply detest organizing and asking people for things. I can’t believe how good you are all being.”

  He was not a man who cared much for women, but he knew when gallantry was called for.

  “Depends how we’re asked, doesn’t it—”

  Sally helped her on half days, and a surge of parents appeared burning with a kind of missionary zeal. A mother with the administrative appetites of Bridget Cavendish made a list of parishes, housing estates, industrial estates, and schools and allotted each one its fundraising representative. Two girls from the sixth form produced a campaign poster, which the father of a third ran off on his commercial copier two hundred times. Volunteers from the fourth and fifth years were given batches of these to pin up. Bridget Cavendish, opening the door to let Benedict out before breakfast one morning, found that a poster had been tied to the bars of the deanery gate in the night. She took it in at once and waved it in outrage at the dean, and quite failed to notice, in the energy of her own reaction, that he looked not so much angry as full of profoundest misery.

  “Just—take it away.”

  “But, Huffo, will you not do something?”

  “I shall do nothing.”

  “It is open defiance and disloyalty.”

  “Confrontation is not the answer.”

  “Huffo, what is the matter with you?”

  He could not look at her, he could hardly bear, at this moment, to be in the same room with this life’s companion who understood nothing of the articles of faith by which he lived. His isolation was very terrible, so terrible that at times just now he could not even look at his God, let alone pray to Him. He raised a hand in a strange helpless gesture and let it fall again.