The Choir

by Joanna Trollope

  He didn’t see much of Ianthe. She was on a real high and out all the time. Like Mike, though not for the same reasons, she was generous in giving Nicholas the credit for “Singing Boy,” in her case because she wanted to strike a bargain with him. She said that she wanted to be the one to break the news of the sales figures to Leo, she wanted to go down to Aldminster alone. Nicholas found that he minded that. The choir, Henry’s choir, was his choir too. He wanted to see Leo look at him with something other than his weary half-smiling pity. He had even visualized a rather emotional interview with the bishop. But he was no match for Ianthe, and he wasn’t going to push his luck; Leo was too intelligent to give all the praise to Ianthe. Leo and Ianthe. Nicholas didn’t know what to make of that but he didn’t like it. He couldn’t think what Leo had been about, making up to Ianthe; she’d probably chucked herself at him—she was like that.

  Two days after the rights in the record had been sold to America, France, and Italy, and the English sales had topped a hundred thousand, Ianthe went down to Aldminster. She travelled first class, and bought a glossy motoring magazine to choose the car she would now buy when she had learned to drive. Ikon had suddenly acquired an accountant, a friend of Mike’s father’s, and he had been very stern with them and said not one single Mini, let alone a Porsche, until he was sure they understood what they were doing and he was sure about their financial position. In her mind Ianthe had pooh-poohed him, because she was so close to her own goal it made her reckless. She smoked long American cigarettes in the train and flipped the pages of her magazine and knew with pleased certainty that people were looking at her.

  She took a cab straight to Chapter Yard and sent her case on to the deanery in it. Leo was at home, alone, looking well and happy, and she liked it that he didn’t kiss her at once but was pretty cool and stood back for her to go into the sitting room. It was tidy and there was a vase of marguerites on the coffee table.

  “Hey—”

  “Cherry Chancellor,” Leo said, “and she’s put a purple whirly thing in the loo that smells worse than any human smell could ever do.”

  Ianthe walked round the room, leisurely, so that he could look at her, and shook back her hair.

  “Want to know the good news?”

  “Of course,” he said politely.

  She put her hands on her hips so that armfuls of bangles clashed dramatically down to her wrists.

  “The choir’ll be OK.”

  “What—”

  “It’s selling and selling. Mike signed up the States and France and an Italian company this week. It’s worked.”

  Some tiny danger light began to glow at the back of Leo’s brain.

  “That’s wonderful. That’s absolutely marvellous. I do congratulate you, really, it’s terrific. What are the figures?”

  She told him.

  “Have you told Alexander?”

  “Not yet.” She eyed him. “Just you.”

  “You must tell Henry.”

  She said, very softly, “Don’t I get a reward?”

  His battered sofa was between them. He put his hands on the back of it, leaned forward and said in the resolute voice he had used long ago to the Iranian girl at St. Mary’s, “You and Mike and Nicholas get my thanks. And everyone else’s too, I should think.”

  She was smiling still.

  “Don’t play games,” she said.

  He straightened.

  “I am not going to kiss you.”

  She glared.

  “What’s all this—”

  “I should not have kissed you in the cathedral. I didn’t intend to and I regretted it the moment I had. I shan’t kiss you again.”

  She began to scream like a beast. She seized cushions off the chairs and the sofa and flung them at him, and then books, and newspapers. Her bracelets clanked and clashed. He came round the sofa, and hit her on the side of the head. She spat at him. He gave her a rough push backwards into a chair and stood hard against her knees so that she couldn’t get up. She scowled up at him, breathless and glowering.

  “What a show-off you are,” he said and walked away.

  She began to cry.

  “How could you do that to me, you mean bastard—”

  “You wanted me to and I did it. I’m not going to repeat myself. I’m very pleased indeed about Henry’s record, but frankly, given the lot of you who run Ikon, I think it’s a fluke, and I’m not going to grovel with gratitude to you or anyone else. The point is the choir.”

  She screamed, “You’re not telling me the truth!”

  He turned.

  “The truth is, Ianthe, that I am in love with Sally Ashworth, I have been since I met her, and I mean to marry her. I have never been within a million miles of being in love with you, and you know it. I’m not responsible for your adolescent fantasies.”

  She began to rock herself about and wail.

  “You’re a first-class shit—”

  Leo went out to the kitchen and plugged in the kettle. The plates and mugs from his and Sally’s breakfast were still in the sink; she had met him at the station and come back for the night with him until it was time to go and collect Henry from the Chilworths’, where he had spent the night. Leo put a finger on the rim of the mug Sally had used, for reassurance. He made tea and took the tray back into the sitting room.

  “I hate you,” Ianthe shouted.

  He put the tray down.

  “Do you want some tea, or do you want to go, straightaway?”

  She sniffed.

  “I don’t know—”

  He handed her a mug.

  “Here.”

  “Leo—”

  “We aren’t talking about it any more. Will you tell your father about the choir?”

  “I might.”

  “I think he’ll be pleased, in his heart of hearts.”

  “You don’t know anything about hearts.”

  Leo sat down on the edge of the sofa with his mug between his hands.

  “I’m pleased for poor old Nicholas over this—”

  Ianthe slammed her mug down and leaped up.

  “I’m going!”

  “As you wish.”

  “I hope you have a bloody awful marriage!”

  He closed his eyes. She banged out of the sitting room and then out of the front door with equal violence. Leo heard her unsteady feet running over the cobbles, across the yard to the close. The bomb had exploded and he was still alive.

  Ianthe went in through the back gate of the deanery, observed that the car was gone and so was Cosmo’s bicycle. She stopped and blew her nose tremendously, tousled her hair, pushed her sleeves up above all her bangles and opened the door of the house.

  “I’m back!”

  There was silence. The kitchen was perfectly tidy; Benedict’s basket was empty. The house was holding its breath in the afternoon quiet. She went through to the drawing room. It was empty. Anticlimax began to descend heavily upon her. She climbed slowly up the stairs and, on the landing, found her mother sitting with folded hands on a little sofa, looking at nothing in particular. Ianthe peered.

  “Mum?”

  Bridget turned slightly.

  “Hello, dear.”

  “You OK?”

  “Perfectly, thank you.”

  Ianthe moved forward.

  “Isn’t that a bit of a funny place to sit?”

  “I felt rather tired. I’m simply longing for Scotland this year, you can’t think—”

  Ianthe dropped on the floor beside her.

  “I think the record’s making so much money the choir’ll be all right for a while. Should I tell Dad?”

  Bridget seemed to come out of some kind of trance.

  “No, Ianthe. We mustn’t trouble him with anything. He’s quite exhausted by it all.”

  “Where’s he gone?”

  There was a silence. Then Bridget turned a sudden, beseeching gaze on her daughter and said, “I don’t know.”

  It was too much for Ianthe. She put her hea
d down on her mother’s expensive print lap and began to sob out her story over Leo, never doubting that whatever ailed her mother, she would have enough to herself to spare to comfort her.

  14

  WHEN THE DEAN ASKED THE BISHOP TO SWITCH ON THE FIRST PART of the new lighting at a special ceremony, the bishop felt he could not refuse. He disliked any kind of ostentation himself, as well as the dean’s slightly flamboyant touch with such occasions, but this was no time for personal scruple. The dean and the Church required his support and they should both have it. He even allowed the dean and the architect and the lighting designer to give him a preview of the eighteen concealed floodlights now mounted on the clerestory shelf and flinging a great sweep of light up into the vault of the nave, and the strip lights hidden below the triforium arches, which gave an almost theatrical glamour to the bays behind them.

  “And you will observe,” the dean said, spreading his arms, “the vast improvement in the appearance of the masonry after washing. The Friends of the Cathedral have given us the most splendid new washing equipment—we are simply racing along. South transept next, eh, Mervyn?”

  Despite his enthusiasm, the bishop did not think the dean looked well; his enthusiasm was staccato. The bishop had tried, on two or three occasions, to suggest that, as brothers in Christ, they might open their hearts to one another, and he had been sharply rebuffed on each occasion. On the contrary, the dean had said to the smallest suggestion that all might not be well, the close had never looked forward to a more promising or united future. All was under control, all differences and difficulties had been sorted out. The bishop knew this was not so, but there was, in the face of the dean’s insistence upon his satisfaction with the state of things, nothing for it but patience. He would at least not add to the dean’s burdens by being in any way disobliging, even if he could not but reflect how infinitely more difficult and elusive his ministry in an English diocese was than it had ever been, somewhat naturally, in India. His life seemed to be too often one long struggle to get across the distance imposed by his position and back to the people whom he loved and missed. When the dean was being human like this, even extra human because he refused to admit to any trouble, the bishop found him very lovable indeed.

  “You,” Janet said to him, “are really just an old busybody in a mitre.”

  “Oh dear—”

  “An immensely sympathetic one. But you do always want to sort people out.”

  “Of course—”

  “You must remember their pride.”

  “I do,” the bishop said firmly. “Otherwise why am I spending a large part of Saturday afternoon being instructed as to which switch to switch? If that isn’t being mindful of the dean’s pride, I can’t think what is.”

  The ceremony was, to his relief, peculiarly dignified. The stand-in choir, rehearsed by Martin, sang two English anthems, and Leo played part of Elgar’s First Organ Sonata, and then his Vesper Voluntaries. During the first anthem, obediently switching switches and spinning dimmers under the watchful eye of the lighting designer, the bishop caused the cathedral nave to wake into a wonderful dawn. The gasp from the congregation was audible above the strains of William Byrd. The dean was observed to be extraordinarily moved, and said his prayer of thanksgiving in a voice that was not at all steady. Frank Ashworth, halfway down the nave, remarked this to himself with a kind of disgust; to him, the dean’s hypocrisy knew no bounds.

  He did not quite know why he was in the cathedral except as a result of instinct, a really strong instinct, which had risen up in him unbidden and demanded to be indulged. He told himself that he wasn’t fooled, he knew people automatically sought a sanctuary in time of trouble, and the traditional sanctuary was a church, and he, Frank, was in trouble. But he wasn’t going because of God; he made that very plain to himself. He was going because he needed calm and quiet and time in a place where the outside world didn’t obtrude. He needed a setting where he could allow his flayed-raw mind to come gently to rest upon the fact that his days as a councillor of Aldminster were, to all intents and purposes, over.

  He had risen at the last meeting to withdraw, for the time being, his proposal that the council should buy the headmaster’s house. He had been told that in an extra session of a newly appointed public facilities committee—sprung up without his knowledge, empowered, it seemed, to spend money at will—the council had offered the dean and chapter three hundred thousand pounds for the house, and it had been accepted. Completion of the deal was to be hurried through in six weeks; by autumn the house would have become a community advice centre, open to all the oppressed people and groups in the city. Frank objected strenuously to such a use and was overpowered. Even his old colleagues, men whom he had worked alongside for twenty years, gave him apologetic glances and voted against him.

  “If we don’t, we’re out,” one neighbour whispered to Frank. “It’s our only chance of staying around. I’d advise you—”

  Frank looked at him with disgust. He rose. He made a short speech about the folly and mendacity of the present council and was treated in return to repeated gibes about his own part in the scheme to save the choir.

  “You should,” Frank said to the chamber in the ancient phrase of morality from his childhood, “you should be ashamed of yourselves.”

  There were jeers and catcalls. Denis Thornton remarked that perhaps Frank would be happier to disassociate himself from a progressive group he clearly could no longer keep up with.

  “There are many people in this city,” Thornton said, “who are keen to take up the burden of public service. Perhaps it’s only right you should make way for someone younger. No pressure from us, of course; it’s quite up to you.”

  For the second time in a month, Frank walked out of a meeting, but this time he walked in utter silence. Even when he closed the door behind him, there was silence. He went up to his office and collected the personal things off his desk—a photograph of Henry, his father’s old brass ink-pot and pen tray, a few mementoes of great civic occasions—and went out to his secretary.

  “Got a box?” he said.

  She stopped typing.

  “What d’you want a box for?”

  He indicated the clutter in his arms.

  “Moving offices, are we? First I’ve heard—”

  “No.”

  She looked straight at him then. He couldn’t recall that she had ever looked at him directly before.

  “Oh, Mr. Ashworth—”

  “Can’t be helped.”

  She found him two carrier bags and packed his belongings into them. They didn’t speak, and it was only when he said goodbye that he noticed she was crying. He said, “Thanks for everything. I’ll keep in touch,” but she only shook her head. He went down the great boastful Victorian staircase, treading deliberately in the centre of the steps, a bag in either hand, and walked across the foyer and out into the car park. The attendant came, as usual, to open the door of his car and make remarks about the weather and Aldminster’s slow progress up the second football division. Frank made his usual replies, put his bags on the back seat of the Rover, and climbed into the front. The attendant gave the roof a pat.

  “I’ve washed her for you, Mr. Ashworth. Might give her a wax Thursday.”

  Frank put the car into gear.

  “It’ll never have another friend like you, Ron. Thanks for everything.”

  He drove home to Back Street and found he was so tired he wanted to lean against the wall of the lift and close his eyes as he was carried upwards. The sitting room of his flat was filled with callous sunshine. He put the bags down, and lowered himself into an armchair and lay there, wondering if this was what a bereavement felt like, this lopping off of a limb, this falling away of the foundation of things. He could do nothing all afternoon and evening, and when night came, he could not sleep. He got up as dawn rose, and sat by his sitting-room window and watched the luminous light strengthen behind the city, and looking at the cathedral, he discovered that he wanted t
o be in it. Somehow it took him all morning to get there, impeded as he was by this peculiar inertia, and when he did arrive, he found himself mixed up with some sort of ceremony to do with a new lighting scheme. He was irritated and felt trapped. He had only wanted to come to be alone in the cool dim space and think a bit. But the irritation itself proved healing, if only because it was a distraction, and he left the cathedral after the service with a brisker step than he had entered it.

  He had left his car at the small park across the close at the top of the Lyng. A path ran across the grass towards it, and he was about thirty yards down it, away from the cathedral, when someone, coming up quickly behind him, said his name. He stopped and turned. Ianthe Cavendish, her hair flying away from her face, said rather breathlessly, “I saw you in the cathedral—”

  “I’d no intention of getting mixed up in a service. I went in for a bit of quiet—”

  She looked extremely overwrought. She came very close to him and said in a rush, “There’s something you ought to know.”

  Ianthe conformed to no ideal of womanhood Frank had ever cherished; girls of her sort hardly seemed to be women, but rather sexless darting insect forms, waiting to grow up into something more substantial. He had scarcely exchanged ten words with Ianthe all her time in Aldminster; there was not, and never had been, the smallest reason for communication between them. He said now, suspiciously, “I don’t listen to gossip.”

  Ianthe seemed to hesitate for a minute, but she said, all the same, “It isn’t gossip. It’s true and it affects Henry.”