The Choir

by Joanna Trollope

  Henry had a good day with Hooper. They gave the puppies obedience lessons—not particularly successful, since their pupils only had a concentration span of a few minutes at a time—and Mrs. Hooper let them make shortbread and chocolate fudge, and two of her friends who came in during the day told Henry they had bought his record and that they thought it was wonderful. They had chicken drumsticks for lunch and in the afternoon they made a rope ladder out of two old washing lines and some chair legs they found at the back of the garage, and tied this to the copper beech Hooper was lucky enough to have in his garden, even though it was a town one. Mrs. Hooper gave them tea in a carrier bag to take up their ladder and eat in the darkness of the tree. The puppies danced round the bottom of the tree and yapped and so they chucked bits of biscuit and crust down to them. When Mrs. Hooper said it was time to take Henry home, he rather hoped Hooper would beg her to let him stay the night, as he often did, but this time he didn’t, and Henry didn’t feel he could ask. He said thank you enormously effusively, to see if that would prompt her, but although she was very nice to him, and had been really kind to him all day, she didn’t seem to get the message. At the back of his mind lurked his apprehensive knowledge that his father would be home, and he rather wanted to postpone seeing him. It was all right for people like Hooper and Chilworth, who saw their fathers all the time, but he just felt a bit jumpy. His father seemed to be coming home in a rush, and Grandpa had something to do with it, and all in all, Henry would have given a great deal to be curling up in a sleeping bag on the floor of Hooper’s bedroom and playing the signalling game with torches that they had got down to a fine art.

  When Mrs. Hooper dropped him at Blakeney Street, his father came out to meet him; it was a great help that she was there to prevent there being any big deal of any kind. “No heavy scene,” Henry said to himself in the phrase he had learned from Wooldridge; Wooldridge used it all the time just now. He and Alan went up the steps together into the house and Alan asked him about his record and said what was it like to be famous. Henry blushed.

  “Just the same—”

  The table was laid for supper, and there was a big bowl of salad in the middle of it, and Sally was feeding Mozart, who was crying loudly, as he always did when he caught sight of the tin opener. Henry rather wanted to pick him up, but that wouldn’t have been fair when he was so longing for his supper. Both his parents seemed rather jerky and peculiar, so he told them about the rope ladder and the puppies and Sally got a baked ham and potatoes out of the stove and they all sat down at the table. It looked perfectly ordinary but somehow it wasn’t being ordinary. Neither his mother nor his father wanted to eat much, and he was so full of tea he wasn’t very hungry either. His father kept asking him questions about the choir and the record and teasing him about being famous and when he said could he get down and go up to bed, they both said no, not just yet, they wanted to talk to him.

  He thought he was going to have a lecture about not getting big-headed about the record, but instead they said a great deal about their not staying married anymore and Mum marrying Mr. Beckford, and how he wasn’t to worry, because nothing would change for him. His father was crying. Henry said, “Will we still live here?”

  His mother said probably not, and then he felt very much that he was going to cry too, and then he did, and then he didn’t want to stay downstairs with them anymore, but rushed out of the room and upstairs and banged his bedroom door. He pulled his duvet off his bed and wound himself into it, like a padded caterpillar, and lay down on his bed, drawing up his feet and pulling down his head until he was quite obliterated in the soft bedfuggy darkness. He couldn’t stop crying; he thought he could probably cry for ever. When Sally came up to him he screamed, “Go away, go away, go away” at her out of his cocoon and went on crying. It was hot and horrible inside his duvet but he wasn’t coming out for anyone; his eyes felt like burning footballs. His parents stood outside his door, on the landing, and listened to him, muttering and sobbing, and when at last he stopped, his mother came in and unrolled him and peeled off his clothes and put on his pyjamas, and he came out of his abrupt angry, anguished sleep to shout at her, “I’m never going to get married!”

  When she came out and went downstairs, Alan managed not to be accusing out loud, but his eyes were full of it. He said he was going to sleep at his father’s and he took his bag and the car keys and went off. When he had gone, Sally picked up the telephone and dialled Leo’s number and at the sound of his voice, she began to cry, like Henry had, as if she could never stop.

  15

  COSMO CAVENDISH TOLD HIS FATHER THAT IANTHE HAD BEEN paid four hundred pounds for telling the newspaper about Leo Beckford and Sally Ashworth. He then added that of course she hadn’t done it for the money. The dean asked in a remarkably alarming voice what were her motives, then, and Cosmo said he didn’t know but he expected she had some.

  “It is difficult to know,” the dean said then, “whether yours or Ianthe’s behaviour is the more unpleasant.”

  Cosmo was dismayed to find he felt a little abashed by this. Rule-breaking was one thing, and a frequently glorious and reputation-enhancing one at that, but suggestions of being an unattractive character were quite another, and disconcerting. His life depended upon his pulling power over other people, his glamour upon rebellion, and he knew well that true distastefulness of personality had no glamour at all. He went away to seek consolation from his mother, who, to his astonishment, declared his father to be entirely right, and so, comforting himself with the knowledge that she wasn’t at all well at the moment—you could tell that, just by looking at her—he went upstairs to his black eyrie to things through. He had misjudged the situation badly and must discover why. After ten minutes he was rather inclined to blame Ianthe for everything, which was fine except that such a conclusion failed to remove the troubling knowledge that he had let himself down somehow, been outsmarted. He went down for supper, after being called three times, to find only two places laid. Bridget said the dean had gone up to London and would not be back until midnight.

  Ianthe was just going out when her father arrived. His appearance, in a dog collar, in her sitting room—the room, her brother Fergus said, of a vulgar theatrical landlady—which contained four friends, all bound for the same concert in Highgate, was extremely startling. Two of the men got instinctively to their feet and had a hard time later explaining this away. The dean, with immense courtesy and authority, emptied the room in ten minutes and then, without a single preliminary, said to his daughter, “And have you any explanation to offer for your disgusting behaviour?”

  Ianthe was torn between tears and temper. She knew that most fathers in the nineteen-eighties didn’t speak to their grown-up daughters in this anachronistic and peremptory way—indeed the Sunday colour supplements paraded frequent interviews with modern fathers apparently craving the approval and affection of their careless daughters—but for all that, she was not sufficiently certain of her ground to fight back. Tears would be an instant admission of guilt. She lit a cigarette and began to walk nonchalantly about the room.

  “Sit down,” her father said.

  Compromising, she hitched one thigh on to the arm of a chair.

  “It is rare in women, I believe,” the dean said, “for reasonable intelligence, which you are fortunate enough to possess, to be allied to glaring emotional immaturity. It would seem to me that you are a member of that unfortunate exceptional group, your case being exacerbated by an unattractive exhibitionism. You are not alone among your brothers and sister in having devoted yourself to defying and ridiculing all the principles by which you were brought up and by which you know I live, but you have carried your campaign to the furthest lengths of damaging folly. While your insults were confined to your home and family they could, with pain and difficulty, be borne. When you involve the reputation of a cathedral close and its inmates your behaviour is to be endured no longer. Are you listening to me?”

  Ianthe said, “Can’t I spea
k?”

  “By all means—”

  She wished suddenly for her mother. She said, too emotionally, “You wouldn’t understand about love, you wouldn’t know what I’ve been through—”

  “I know about love,” the dean said with distaste. “I am fortunate enough not to know about infatuation. Leo Beckford never gave you, to my knowledge, the smallest encouragement and your feelings were the result of your own deliberate exaggeration and persistence. The more he rebuffed you, the more you clung. In a stupid girl, I should regard such behaviour with pity. In a clever one, I view it only with contempt.”

  “And you call yourself a priest!” she shouted.

  “It is not, Ianthe, a priest’s function to be a bottomless well of woolly uncritical forgiveness. That would only devalue virtue.”

  There was a pause. Ianthe went over to the window and leaned her forehead on the glass and looked down into the early evening street. She was very frightened and full of a self-disgust she was desperate to find a culprit for. The carapace of illusory independence she had shielded herself with since she inherited her five thousand pounds on her eighteenth birthday—refusing, simultaneously, the university place she had been offered—felt very thin and fragile. When the dean said, in a voice quite empty of warmth, “If you have made fools of us all, you have made a worse one of yourself,” she tried to speak and could say nothing.

  “We must all give ourselves time to recover from this business,” the dean said. “Your mother and I go to Scotland next week and Cosmo goes to Wales. For all our sakes, we should not see each other for a while—”

  She spun round.

  “I can’t come home?”

  “Not for a while. A few months. Are you in financial difficulties?”

  She blushed scarlet.

  “No—”

  “The weeks ahead are going to be hard ones for Aldminster and there will have to be changes. I have yet to speak to the bishop and the archdeacon, yet to consider Leo Beckford’s position. But you must stay away. You have Fergus and Petra in London and you have work to do. The money you received for the imparting of information must be returned to the newspaper.”

  Ianthe had a flash of spirit.

  “May I not give it to the choir fund?”

  “I believe,” the dean said, “the choir fund hardly needs it.”

  He went towards the door. He longed to be gone, out of this room with its musty pseudo-Edwardian clutter, away from this headstrong child of his, whose present unhappiness seemed to him just a symptom of the self-indulgent volatility of her whole temperament, away from London. Ianthe gave an odd little whimper. The dean crossed the room and put his arm about her. His heart was as heavy as lead. He said, “God willing, this will all pass,” and then he kissed her briefly on the top of her head and went away to catch his train back to Aldminster.

  “Any more grave faces round the close,” the bishop said, “and I shall want to skip into the cathedral wearing a false nose. May I come in for a moment?”

  Leo, who was laughing, said of course and led the way into his sitting room. He indicated the bishop’s cassock.

  “If you walked across the close to see me dressed like that, I should think curtains were twitching all the way.”

  “I haven’t time to go back after seeing you and change for even-song. May I sit here? Now look, Leo, I’ve come to see you before the dean does. It isn’t strictly speaking, being chapter business, any of my concern, but humanly speaking it’s my concern all the way. I’m rather sorry that in the last few months, with all this coming to a head, you haven’t been to see me. There Janet and I were, worrying away about the choir, and all the time you were busy on quite another tack. I’d rather hoped, you see, that we had established some kind of trust—”

  Leo looked affectionately at him.

  “The other man I trust tried to stop me.”

  “Alexander Troy?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know they are to be turned out of their house?”

  “I do—”

  “Another sorry muddle. Another good idea perverted by the motives of self-interest. But Leo, what troubles me is that your relationship with Sally Ashworth seems to have been so sudden, and of course I am deeply anxious that all the upheaval it is causing really is for something—”

  “It is.”

  The bishop took off his spectacles and swung them by one hinge.

  “The impulses springing from loneliness are so powerful, as are those when our lives reach, as all lives must, some kind of plateau. Are you thinking of marriage?”

  “And children,” Leo said.

  The bishop put the earpiece of his spectacles between his teeth.

  “Social orthodoxy never troubles me, as you know, only the helping of forces for good, be they traditional or progressive.”

  “Sally and I will be a force for good. I thought at first that I was the one in greatest need, but I’ve come to think rather delightedly that it might be the other way about. In any case, there’s plenty of building to be done. I suppose you wouldn’t marry us?”

  “There’s a blessing service—”

  “No. No, marry us. Marry us properly.”

  The bishop put on his spectacles and said thoughtfully, “In a year’s time, I might. If you think it’s really necessary. If it’s what you really want—”

  Leo smiled.

  “Is this some kind of test?”

  The bishop looked up at the ceiling.

  “Dear me, how suspicious you are.” He paused and then dropped his gaze directly on Leo. “I must say something else to you before I go, something that I don’t much want to say.” He leaned forward. “Leo, immense loss as you will be, you must resign from the cathedral before you are asked to do so.”

  There was a pause.

  “Is the dean going to ask me to resign?”

  “I haven’t spoken to the dean, but I don’t think he has any option but to ask for your resignation. You would be doing both him and yourself a service if you were to take the initiative.”

  “But—”

  “The dean,” the bishop said firmly, “has more to bear than we know of. If anything is amiss with cathedral or close—and nothing ever is amiss without repercussions ripping out all over the diocese—the blame is laid at his door. I shouldn’t think there are many deans who have served their cathedrals as Hugh Cavendish has served Aldminster, and if it has brought him joy, it has also brought him suffering of which he has never complained. For his organist simply to make a quiet and dignified exit will mean much to him and to Aldminster and I think you underestimate how much he values your contribution.” He stood up. “I seem to be sounding rather pompous. I really only meant to say with as much affection and simplicity as I could manage that you must leave Aldminster but that one of my greatest friends, headmaster of a significant school in Sussex, is badly in need of a director of music. They are regular performers at the Brighton Festival, I gather.”

  “And Sally?”

  “The headmaster must be put entirely in the picture.”

  “Thank you,” Leo said with energy.

  The bishop waved a hand.

  “Don’t. Absolutely don’t. Anything that gets this poor precious old ship back on an even keel is its own reward. Aren’t you playing for evensong?”

  “No, it’s Martin—”

  “Ah,” said the bishop. “Well, there we are. There’s someone who will benefit from all this—”

  Alan stayed in his father’s spare bedroom for a week. It was a week he felt he never wished to repeat, from the wretched nights on the old Victorian boat bed that had belonged to his great-grandmother to the grim days when he felt he had sympathy from nobody. His father, though not actively unkind, made it plain that Alan was facing what had been inevitable for some years, inevitable because of his and Sally’s choices. In this life, Frank said more than once, you can only reap where you have sown, and if you don’t like the harvest, it’s no good casting about for someone
else to blame for it. When Alan went up to Blakeney Street to try and sort things out with Sally, and the interview disintegrated rapidly into accusation and acrimony, he resolved to take his father with him the next time. For both Alan and Sally, Frank’s bulk and impartiality were immensely comforting; for Henry they were a lifeline.

  It was Frank who, without condoning what Sally was doing, or rebuking Alan further for what he had done, made it clear that there was no marriage left for either of them to build on. It was Frank who made solictors’ appointments for them both. It was Frank who took Henry off for hours on end and was just ordinary with him. On one walk they met Leo coming rapidly across the close, and to Henry’s relief and gratitude, neither his grandfather nor his future stepfather appeared to be anything other than normal. Leo came round to Blakeney Street later that day and Henry, who had said he wanted to do something in his room, sat on the stairs and heard Leo tell his mother that they were probably going to Sussex. Henry had only the haziest notion of where Sussex might be, but a very defined notion that he didn’t want to go there, wherever it was. He went down to the big room straightaway and said so.

  “It’s a school,” Leo said, “with a strong choral tradition and a famous chapel. Why should that be so different to here?”

  “Everywhere’s different to here. I don’t want it to be different.”

  Sally said encouragingly, “It’s always difficult to imagine a kind of life that you aren’t living, but why shouldn’t another life be better?”

  Henry thought.

  “I don’t want it to be better or anything. I just don’t want it to be different from now.”

  Leo had his arm round Sally. When Henry burst in, she had instinctively tried to move away but he had held her firmly.

  “The thing is, Henry, that I have to leave Aldminster.”

  “Why—”

  “Because there has been a lot of rubbishy publicity about Aldminster recently, including that bit in the paper about my marrying your mother. It’s bad for the cathedral and the close if I stay—”