“Nothing is the matter. Nothing in the least. I fight my battles, Bridget, by diplomacy, not cannonades.”
“I think you need a holiday. You are not in the least yourself, poor tired Huffo—”
He said nothing. She put the poster down and went briskly about the room patting cushions and adjusting vases and pictures. Then she said in a voice of stifling motherliness, “Breakfast in two ticks, dear,” and went out.
He went, as usual, to the window. It was a pearly morning and the close wore the ancient, mysterious sanctity that was its own, late and early each day. In the soft light the cathedral seemed to float a little on its vast green cushion. Hugh Cavendish gripped the windowsill.
“Dean,” he said to himself. “Dean of the Cathedral Church of Aldminster. Dean.”
“Heavens,” Felicity Troy said, “I’d no idea there was anyone here. Who are you?”
The young man in a fawn suit with a surveyor’s rule in his hand said that he was from the cathedral architect’s office and that Mrs. Troy’s lady in the kitchen had let him in, seeing as it was official.
“Official?”
“Mr. Mount was coming himself, Mrs. Troy. He particularly wanted me to explain to you. But he has a migraine, he suffers dreadfully from migraines—”
“I don’t want to be unsympathetic,” Felicity said, “at least, my better self doesn’t. But I wonder if Mr. Mount’s headache has any connection with having to survey this house?”
The young man looked shocked.
“Indeed it hasn’t. He’s confined to his bed. He had a terrible night and could hardly speak to me over the telephone.”
“And why did he not telephone me? And why did he not telephone to make an appointment in the first place?”
“I believe he tried several times but could get no reply. He was very short of time, you see. The dean wanted the house looked at urgently.”
“The dean?”
They were standing on the extraordinary staircase, with its heavy Baroque newel posts and shallow, generous treads, at the point where a vast window on the half landing, filled with luminous old glass, gave a wide green view down into the garden.
“The dean’s ordered a survey of all close property,” the young man said. He looked anxious. “It’s purely routine.”
“Then why do you need to measure anything?”
“The dean wanted a particularly detailed survey of this house.”
There was a huge blue-and-white bowl on a chest in the window, filled with potpourri. The young man gave it a nervous stir with the end of his pencil.
“I tried to telephone too, Mrs. Troy, but there still was no answer, and my instructions were to come today.”
“Where have you been?”
“The ground floor only, and I was just going up—”
“But now you are not.”
“I’m afraid my instructions are—”
“I don’t like your instructions,” Felicity said. “I suspect them. And I don’t like the way a detailed survey has suddenly been bounced on us without warning. I want to know what’s going on.”
The young man said desperately, “I must see the roof—”
Felicity moved very slightly so that he could not climb higher without barging past her.
“I’m aware this visit isn’t your fault, but I’m afraid you can’t go any further. I’m sure your visit is really a valuation, and if my suspicions are correct, we should have proper notice. You go away, like a good boy, and tell Mervyn that.”
He blushed rose pink.
“But Mr. Mount sent me.”
“Tell him that I sent you back.”
He began to retreat down the stairs. He looked wretched. She followed him, two steps higher all the time.
“Just off-the-cuff, what do you think it is worth?”
He stared at her.
“I couldn’t tell you that!”
“A quarter of a million?”
His eyes bulged.
“I don’t know.”
She stepped past him and opened the front door. Sunlight fell in across the flagstones. He hurried out.
“Goodbye, Mrs. Troy.”
“Goodbye,” she said; then she shut the door on him and the sunlight.
She felt sick. The hall, with its painted panelling, its benign and beloved proportions, square and welcoming, seemed to sway and bulge at her. Keeping close to the walls, she crept round to the staircase and crouched on the bottom step. Lose the house. Alexander had said something lightly of it but they had both known that Hugh Cavendish would sell his children before he’d sell a single building in the close. But if the unthinkable happened, if some weird change of the dean’s heart had taken place to do with nothing at all logical or predictable, they would have no power to stay. The headmaster had to be housed, certainly, and to a certain standard, beyond doubt, but not necessarily in the most lovely of the domestic buildings round the close. That had been such unbelievable luck, when they had come to Aldminster, to find that traditionally the headmaster had always lived in the house. It had been an unspeakable solace to her, exuding charm and tolerance. Was the loss of it the price they might have to pay for the choir?
She got up slowly and went into the sitting room. She had written poetry here. She hadn’t written any in months, and of course her recent exuberance was the worst possible state of mind for poetry. She sat down in the spoon-back chair she had rescued off a skip one day and gazed at the garden. If the choir was going to require the price of the house, did she want to pay it? What was she fighting for? For the music, for history, for God, for Alexander, all of them, none of them …
She closed her eyes. She was fighting the darkness, the undreamed-of darks within herself, the black dishonesties without. Her lips moved.
“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”
Her lashes were wet. Saint Paul would not have cared for her tears at all, being something of a misogynist, relentless, illumined, one of the most single-minded men in all history. She blew her nose. It was perhaps absurd to sit here on a Thursday morning and lament the fate either of her house or of the world’s soul. She went purposefully over to the telephone, an instrument she feared, and dialled the number of Ikon’s offices in the Charing Cross Road.
12
“IT WOBBLES,” HENRY ASHWORTH SAID.
“Not if you don’t fidget.”
“He can’t sing if he’s got to think about not fidgeting—”
“Does he have to be that high?”
“Yes. Definitely. I want the sound to go out into the building—”
Henry experimented with his weight all on one foot and then the other. The pile of wooden boxes rocked smartly.
“Wedges,” Mike said to Nicholas over the intercom from the choir vestry, where all the equipment was set up. Mike fascinated Henry. He was wearing dark glasses even in the cathedral and he treated Henry as if he were an adult.
“I want space in the sound,” Mike said. “OK? And move those mikes out a bit. The space mikes. We’ve got to get presence into this. OK? Now, Henry, give us a note.”
Henry sang F sharp.
“It’s weird in here,” Mike said. “The usual levels are chronic. Perhaps we’ll have to move you down the place a bit, down those steps into the—”
“Nave,” Henry said helpfully, “the sanctuary steps.”
“OK,” Mike said, waving his hands at Ianthe, whom he disliked to see his ignorance of anything. “OK, OK! The nave—”
He was amazed to find himself here, and even more amazed to find himself charmed by it. He’d never recorded outside a studio before; he hadn’t come across professionals like Leo and Henry since school, professionals who were strangely impersonal after the rock musicians he was used to. He supposed it was a different kind of identification really; he’d have to think about that. Ianthe had brought him a tape
she’d made of Henry singing George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” and he’d been really impressed. It wasn’t just the voice, it was the phrasing. He heard it at the end of a bad week, a week in which he’d had to tell Jon that Ikon couldn’t just carry him any more and Jon had taken it really badly and Steven had threatened to go too and he’d given them three days to think things over. So on impulse, he’d said to Ianthe that he’d come down to Aldminster, and here he was, with all the equipment installed with her in the choir vestry and Nick with a stop watch and him with the score and this nice kid who seemed to be able to do almost anything with his voice that you asked him and this cathedral. He thought it was sensational, but it spooked him, too.
“OK up there?” Nicholas said to Henry.
Henry beamed at him.
“Yes,” he said.
The cathedral was dim but not dark, and to be alone up there in the great shadowy space was quite exalting. He wished, though, that it was full; he would have liked packed rows of people to sing to. They started with the Handel. He was very excited, he could feel his lungs filling and filling, and his arms rose involuntarily from his sides like wings. Then he made a mistake.
“Mr. Beckford, I keep getting this wrong, third line down, second bar, ‘and preach the gospel of peace’—”
It took take after take. Then “Greensleeves,” which he and Leo had rehearsed over and over, and then the French song, which he loved, sending his voice down the cascade of notes like a waterfall. He began to pull violent faces between takes.
“He’s getting bored,” Leo said. “We must give him a break—”
Henry jumped up and down experimentally on his tower for a bit.
“Oh I like it, I really do, but there’s no-one to look at—”
“Once more,” Mike said from the choir vestry, “once more. Hold each note back till the last minute. Get it?”
Henry closed one eye and snapped his fingers.
“Yeah, man,” he said to himself, alone on his box. “Yeah, man.”
Sally imagined that during these evenings while Henry was at the cathedral she would have the time and peace to think things out. She had made a few plans already. Quentin Small had agreed to take her on full-time as long as she would also do his books for him for less than his accountant, and she had looked at three flats and been alarmed by all of them. She had decided not to see Leo for the moment, in case the effect he had on her clouded her thinking, but then of course she thought about him in the time she should have given to thinking about her future. And then Alan rang. It was perfectly logical that he should, having received her letter, but somehow she had wanted to trust to the usual difficulty of telephoning from Saudi Arabia, and so she got a tremendous fright when she picked up the telephone and it was him. He sounded exasperateingly calm, almost jovial.
“What’s all this then, Sal?”
“Didn’t you read my letter?”
“Sure, but—”
“Then you know. I’m sick of being shackled to a man who doesn’t give a damn for anyone but himself.”
Alan said, “I know I’ve been away for a long time but you know that it’s all for us—”
“Don’t give me that stuff—”
There was a tiny pause.
“Look here,” Alan said, “we can’t discuss this at x pounds a minute. I can’t come back just right now; we’re actually installing and I can’t take my eye off them for a minute. But I’ll be back in a month. We’ll talk then.”
“I might not be here in a month.”
Alan said, as if it were a well-known fact, “You won’t leave Blakeney Street. What kind of position would that put you in?”
“What have you rung for?” Sally demanded.
“You sounded wound up, in your letter—”
“Wound up?”
“Yes. I feel bad I’ve been away so long.”
She felt feverish with temper.
“I don’t want to talk to you any more, Alan. I’m going to put the telephone down—”
“Don’t push me, Sal, don’t push me—”
“Is that a threat?”
His voice changed.
“How’s Henry?”
She gave a wild squeal and flung the receiver at the wall. It bounced once or twice to the length of its curly cable and then clattered to the floor. When she picked it up, the line was dead; Alan must have put his end down almost at once. She was absolutely consumed with fury and loathing, shaking with them, whole degrees of passion beyond being able to cry. She lay face down on the rush matting of the big-room floor and just yelled and yelled. It seemed to her so disgusting that a person like Alan should be in her life at all, let alone Henry’s father; it was utterly offensive, revolting, violating. His indifference, his complacency, his hypocrisy, his phoney sentimentality … She remembered his saying to her, eyes wide with incredulity, when she had taxed him with using call girls and he had admitted it, “But, Sal, that’s not cheating on you!” Her whole existence seemed insulted by having to share it with such a man.
She stopped screaming and sat up. Mozart, asleep in the basket of clothes waiting to be ironed, had not stirred. The old blue plates still rolled along the dresser shelves, the lamplight fell on the newspaper where she had cast it on the floor, the loaf sat decoratively in its trail of crumbs on the wooden board, left over from making Henry a sandwich. Even the telephone, back on its cradle on the wall, was pretending nothing had happened. She began to cry then, noisily and messily, roaring with her mouth open like a cross child. Self-pity Mozart could not take; he rose measuredly from the ironing basket, paced across the floor, and let himself out through the cat flap into the little garden behind. It was horribly lonely when he had gone.
She got up from the floor and went over to the sink and ran cold water into her cupped hands to splash on to her face. Then she tore yards off a roll of paper towel and dried her face and blew her nose; her skin felt as if it were several sizes too small. One of Henry’s jerseys lay on a rush-seated chair by the table. She picked it up and held it against her as she went up the stairs and then, repulsed by her own sentimentality, folded it with rigorous precision and put it away in his cupboard. She had hardly finished making up her face when the front door banged thunderously and Henry was stampeding into the big room shouting, “Mum, Mum, it was brill—”
She went down to him. He was wildly excited.
“He said empty your pockets and I said why, and he said otherwise you’ll jangle and I had to take my watch off and I coughed by mistake in the Ave waiting for my note and the tuning suddenly went adrift and I had to do a million re-takes and they built me this sort of tower, I’m miles high, and Mr. Beckford had to play the organ so I couldn’t see him and the mike cost five thousand pounds Mike said. It was fantastic.”
She made him scrambled eggs, and Mozart, reassured by Henry’s return that there would be no more unpleasant emotional displays, came back in and cried for milk.
“Can’t wait till tomorrow,” Henry said, “it was so superb.”
“You mustn’t get too excited. It might not sell at all, you know, it’s a tiny company, hardly anybody knows about it.”
“But it’ll be in the cathedral shop,” Henry said, “and Ianthe’s going to take my photo for the cover and then do a mad drawing all round it—”
“In your ruff?”
“No, casuals.” He looked longing. “She said had I got a baseball jacket.” “And?”
“Couldn’t I?”
“But they’re so awful—”
“They’re brilliant.”
“Shall we talk about it tomorrow, when you’re less over-the- moon and I’ve adjusted my prejudices?”
He grinned.
“You sound like Mr. Troy. He came in to watch us. He said I was great.”
She got up and picked up his plate.
“Mozart and I think you’re a bighead.”
He was delighted. He went capering upstairs doo-dahing loudly to himself, and then she heard t
he taps being turned on full blast and through the rush of water the eerie, haunting notes of the shepherd boy’s song from Auvergne.
He fell plumb from the summit of excitement into oblivion. She sat on the edge of his bed until he slept, then she went downstairs, and because he had made her feel so much more normal, she dialled Leo’s number. A girl answered.
“Could I speak to Leo?”
“Sorry,” Ianthe said, “he’s not here. He was, but he’s gone off again—”
“It’s Sally Ashworth—”
“Hi!” Ianthe said with warmth. “Henry tell you how it went? It was really great—”
Sally said untruthfully, “That’s why I rang.”
“Henry’s such a performer. I mean, Mike doesn’t usually say much, but he’s mad on Henry. He and Leo’ve gone to the pub. I’ll say you rang.”
“No,” Sally said, “don’t bother. I just wanted to know if you were all as excited as Henry is.”
“You bet.”
“Night,” Sally said.
She put the telephone down with immense care to compensate it for earlier manhandling. She was so exhausted she couldn’t bring herself to do all the tidying, preparing things she usually did at night. She pulled herself upstairs by the bannisters, tread by tread, washed with a clumsy staggeringness, and fell into bed. She lay there for a few minutes, almost stunned. Then she dragged herself up again, crossed unsteadily to the mantelpiece, tugged off her wedding ring and dropped it into the Chinese jar where hair-grips and stray buttons and safety pins from the dry cleaners seemed to accumulate. She stood for a moment, head bowed, and then she turned and toppled back into bed to sleep as if she had been felled.
“I should have rung,” Frank Ashworth said, “but I found myself in the close, so I thought I’d drop by.”
Felicity, holding the front door half open between them, regarded him without welcome.
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