The Choir

by Joanna Trollope

  Henry said rudely, “Don’t get married then.”

  “For whose sake?”

  Henry went over to the dresser and kicked at the bottom of the doors for a bit.

  “I don’t see the point—”

  Sally said, “Of course you don’t. But you will, in time.”

  “Why do I have to go to Sussex?”

  “Because we are going and you must live with us until you are older. Then you can live where you like.”

  Henry’s throat was suddenly thick with angry tears.

  “Why does all this have to happen? Why can’t we just do what we were doing?”

  “Because,” Leo said, “human beings never stand still, and nor do their relationships. They either develop or die. Look at you and Hooper, hardly speaking a year ago and now best mates. That’s change. It may change again, and if it does, you won’t die of it. All your father and mother and I are doing is changing, but as we are adults, it makes bigger waves.”

  Henry shouted, “I’m not going to horrible Sussex!”

  He stamped out of the room and went upstairs. He got out a drawing pad and his tin of paint sticks and wrote “NO NO NO” all over several sheets of paper in the most violent colours he could find. After a while his mother came up and said they were going out for half an hour, to walk, and did he want to come. He yelled no, he didn’t. After they had gone, he went downstairs to the television and the telephone rang.

  “Is that Henry?”

  “Yes—”

  “It’s Nick Elliott.”

  “Oh,” Henry said with warmth, “hi!”

  “How are you doing?”

  “OK—”

  “Listen, I really rang to speak to your mum. Is she there?”

  “No, she’s gone for a walk—”

  “Well, I’ll tell you. How do you feel about making another record?”

  “Great” Henry said, and then, remembering, “but I can’t. I’ve got to go to Sussex.”

  “Sussex? Why on earth—”

  “Mum and Mr. Beckford are going.”

  There was a pause.

  “Sorry,” Nicholas said, “I forgot.”

  Henry was afraid he might be going to cry.

  “Look,” Nicholas said, sensing it, “d’you want to talk?”

  “I don’t know—”

  “I know how you feel. My dad went off when I was five and I only ever had my mum and she’s a nutter. Tell you what, I’ll come down. I’ll come down on Saturday. We’ll go and have a pizza. OK?”

  “Thanks,” Henry said.

  “Want some good news?”

  “Yes—”

  “You’ve sold, in England and Europe, one hundred and fifty thousand copies.”

  “Wow—”

  “Pity they won’t let you give any interviews.”

  “Well, I’m a chorister, you see, I’m a chorister really.”

  “You hold on to that,” Nicholas said. “That’ll get you through. I’ll see you Saturday.”

  Nicholas took Henry to the pizza place where Ianthe had taken him three months before. Henry had the Super Special and a tall glass of Coca-Cola with a blob of ice cream in it, and Nicholas thought for the thousandth time how amazing it was to have money in his pocket that he had earned and that was entirely his own to spend. They talked mostly about the choir, and Nicholas told Henry how he had nearly died of envy that morning, coming into the cathedral and hearing them singing “Tu es Petrus” and Henry remembered coming down the steps and finding him, because Harrison had swiped him with a flute case and his leg really hurt. They did imitations of Leo—“Now keep that note really clean to the end,” “Come on, you little horror, open, open, open”—and compared memories of choir outings and Henry said they were going to Norway next term and then he remembered about Sussex and for the first time he looked terribly depressed.

  “Don’t go. Don’t go to Sussex. If you stay here you’ll be head chorister in under two years.”

  “I’ve got to—”

  “Why?”

  “Because of Mum and Mr. Beckford.”

  “You could board at school.”

  “Yes,” Henry said dejectedly.

  “Come on—”

  “None of my friends do.”

  “You’d make new friends.”

  “I don’t want anything new,” Henry said.

  “Look,” Nicholas said, “the most important thing is the choir. Right? You can’t leave that. But if you’re going to stay in it, you’ll have to think of some other way of staying in Aldminster. Boarding isn’t too awful, and then you could spend the holidays with your mother and Mr. Beckford.”

  Henry looked unconvinced.

  “What about your father?” Nicholas said.

  “He’s going back to Saudi Arabia soon. That’s where his job is.”

  “Oh. Well you can’t live with him there—”

  “I don’t think he likes being in Aldminster much.”

  “But he’s your dad—”

  “Oh yes—” Henry looked away.

  “When I have kids, I’m going to stay right with them.”

  Henry said nothing. Nicholas summoned the waitress for the bill, and went over to the cash desk to pay. Henry stayed on his chair and felt very full. When Nicholas came back he said, “That was superb. Thanks a lot.”

  Nicholas walked him home. He very much wanted to put in a word for Leo, but there didn’t seem to be the right moment, with Henry in the mood he remembered all too well himself feeling, that the world was deliberately trying to make you miserable. Instead, as they went along Blakeney Street, he said that the only way to feel better was to make something happen that you wanted, and he knew he was a fine one to talk but he was convinced it was true all the same.

  “Like what?”

  “Well, you want to stay in Aldminster so you’ve got to make that happen.”

  Henry went into the house and found his mother and his grandfather sitting at the big table, talking about him. In case they had been planning something while he was out, he thought he had better remind them that he wasn’t going to Sussex.

  “I see,” Frank said.

  “Nicholas said why don’t I board—”

  Sally looked at her father-in-law.

  “I’ve thought of that. But even with an assisted place—”

  “Alan could afford it.”

  “I don’t want to board,” Henry said.

  Frank looked at him.

  “Look here, young man. All these shan’ts and won’ts and don’t wants. You’ll have to compromise somewhere.”

  Henry thought he sounded like Mr. Beckford. At least Leo and Frank never apologized to him or got all wet about things. He said suddenly, the words leaping from his mouth without the idea seeming to have entered his brain first, “Why can’t I come and live with you?”

  In ten days, the dean caught four salmon and Bridget one. They stayed in the usual lodge with the usual group of friends—a consultant at a large provincial hospital, an antiquarian bookseller, and a Queen’s Counsel, with all their wives—and the signs of strain visible upon the Cavendishes were put down by almost all of them to the difficulties of Aldminster life in the last few months. The wife of the bookseller, who was extremely astute and infinitely more interested in people than salmon, observed to her husband that she thought the Cavendish marriage was not looking healthy and, what was more, that Hugh seemed to have the upper hand. The bookseller, who had spent five fishing holidays with the dean and his wife, and who had, like all the others, come to regard Bridget’s supremacy in the marriage as the kind of joke they were all glad they were not part of, said nonsense, impossible, she was making it up. Charlotte Knight took Bridget to Ballater to stock up on groceries and boldly asked her outright if everything was all right as they drove.

  Bridget said you simply couldn’t imagine the strain of the last few months, seeing Huffo so gravely misunderstood when all his endeavours were for the cathedral, and to be defied by his own organi
st and, worse, by the headmaster of the King’s School, who hadn’t scrupled to use a public platform most improperly, had made life at times frankly unbearable. All the time she was speaking, she was adjusting her silk headscarf with funny little nervous plucking movements. Charlotte Knight said, probing, “Yes, I know. I should think it’s frightful to be in a public position and have stones wrongly thrown at you, but at least you have each other. I mean, almost any trouble is bearable if you have someone to share it with.”

  Bridget did not reply to this. Glancing at her, Charlotte saw she had turned her head away. They drove on a little in silence and then Charlotte said, “And how awkward that Ianthe has helped to save the day with the choir.”

  Bridget said sepulchrally, “It has almost broken her heart.”

  “Twenty-year-old hearts do mend—”

  “Oh yes,” Bridget said, “I imagine twenty-year-old ones have a better chance than older ones.”

  It had gone far enough.

  “Now come on,” Charlotte said, “you’re the cook. Think of something simple and interesting we can give that hopeless girl to cook for us tonight. And don’t say salmon—”

  On the banks of the Dee, allotted a favourite beat, the Dean and the QC were assembling their rods.

  “I do congratulate you on saving the choir,” John Claremont said. “It’s been a marvellous effort. That splendid little boy. I hear Rochester’s thinking of axing theirs now. It’s the most awful prospect, frankly, cathedrals without choirs. I often wished we’d tried Mark for a choir school—marvellous classical education for almost nothing and all that music too. May I borrow your gaff? That looks pretty heavy water to me.”

  The dean, who had hoped rather vainly that in Scotland the talk would all be of fish and not at all of Aldminster, said of course, but unfortunately the choir had got all the publicity the fabric of the cathedral should have got. If the cathedral roof was to be repaired, some grave sacrifices would have to be made.

  “Sacrifices?”

  “My dear John,” the dean said, spinning the drum of his reel, “what the public doesn’t know is that I’m being forced to sell the best building in the close to keep water out of the nave.”

  “You don’t mean it—”

  “I do indeed. Thousands pour in to keep the choir going while another precious part of our heritage passes into the hands of a very dubiously motivated city council—”

  The ghillie came up at this point and said there were two big fish under a ledge at the bottom of the pool. John Claremont said jocularly, “All ready for me to bounce a worm on their noses, Angus!”

  The ghillie looked disapproving.

  “It must be a frightful strain. No wonder poor Bridget—”

  “Well,” the dean said, cutting him off and moving down the bank after the ghillie, “when things mean a lot to you, they’re bound to take their toll.”

  That night, Bridget burst into tears at dinner. The talk had turned inevitably to Aldminster, and the dean was gravely explaining the impossible juggling act he had to perform between the cathedral’s income and the insatiable demands made upon it, when she cried, “Oh I wish I’d never even heard of the wretched choir! It’s all because of that—” and rushed from the room in tears. Charlotte Knight followed her upstairs and sat beside her on her bed, patting her heaving, solid shoulder and saying soothing nothings about the healing effects of time.

  “We had such a wonderful marriage,” Bridget said between sobs, “never a cross word and I knew I was such a help to him, I knew it. I know the children have been rather naughty and perhaps I was a little inclined to take their parts, but surely a mother may be forgiven for that!” She rolled over and gazed at Charlotte in sudden terror.

  “Do you suppose he would like to leave me?”

  “He won’t do that.”

  “But would he like to?”

  Charlotte, who was not a soft-hearted woman, looked at her peach-powdered face, messily ravaged by tears, with real pity.

  “I think he’s in as much of a state as you are. He doesn’t know what he wants.”

  Bridget sat up and pulled pink tissues from the box by her bed.

  “I don’t think I have ever been afraid before.” She blew her nose loudly and a well-trained hand moved up instinctively to pat her hair into place. “I only want to be a good wife.”

  “It doesn’t look to me as if Hugh’s being a particularly good husband just now—”

  “Suppose it is all my fault?”

  “The choir isn’t your fault. You’ve always bossed Hugh around, of course, we’ve made a bit of a joke about it, but if he didn’t like it, couldn’t he tell you so?”

  Bridget swung her legs to the floor. Unexpectedly she said, “Perhaps I wouldn’t have listened.”

  “Well—certainly you’ve always had to be right—”

  Bridget went over to the chest of drawers and looked at herself in the glass on top of it. Her expensive jersey dress was rucked up at the back and she looked strangely ludicrous and inappropriate without her shoes on. After a while she said to Charlotte in her more usual voice, “I wonder if you’d explain that I have a shocking headache. And I should be more than grateful for a cup of tea.”

  “Would you like me to talk to Hugh?”

  Bridget turned round.

  “Oh no. Thank you but certainly not. We get by quite civilly just now and so it will remain until he chooses to speak to me more—intimately.”

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  “I am not,” Bridget said, “thinking about that just now.”

  Charlotte stood up and went over to the door.

  “I’ll get your tea.”

  Felicity said that if she had to live in the second master’s house she felt that being asked to live with the school bursar’s choice of wallpaper was overdoing it. Stanley Vigors, mellow at the happy prospect of actually moving into the main school building, said how funny she should mind, he hadn’t noticed them at all somehow.

  “How could you not notice,” Felicity said, making sweeping gestures in the sitting room, “vinyl tweed and Regency stripes. I’m going to get the entire house painted, every corner, and banish every plastic doorhandle and all the lavatory glass.”

  “Well, it is a bit of a comedown for you—”

  “No it isn’t,” Felicity said, “it’s a high old challenge.”

  “I suppose,” Stanley said, feeling that this was a remark his mother would appreciate more than Felicity, “that it will be easier to keep—”

  She laughed and gave him a swift kiss, which made him blush. He didn’t think he’d ever seen her in such good spirits, or so confident, so that seeing her whisking about his house in her tremendous skirts while she measured and considered made him realize, with a curious alarm, how boring he had made it. She had left a red shawl lying in his sitting room, among the beige and olive green, and it was quite amazing the difference it had made. She had never been his idea of a headmaster’s wife, but seeing her here made him think that she was very much his idea of … He stopped himself, blushed ever more darkly, and asked her if she would like some coffee.

  “No thanks. I had it at the deanery. In a bone china cup with homemade shortbread.”

  “The deanery!”

  “Olive branch,” she said airily. “I’m not sure it isn’t rather irritating of Alexander and me not to mind as much as we were supposed to. It’s certainly very surprising, and nobody is more surprised than us. But then, you see, the choir is safe for now and Daniel wants to come home for Christmas and I shall bend this nasty little house to my will if it kills me.”

  Stanley put a reassuring hand on the nearest woodchip-paper-covered wall.

  “Not nasty,” he said, in case it was listening.

  “Very nasty.”

  She had said as much to Bridget Cavendish, who had lost a lot of weight and who was undeniably less authoritative. When Hugh had come in, she was almost, astonishingly, nervous. Felicity said to him, “I hope you are pro
perly sorry for us over our dismal new abode.”

  He looked briefly outraged, but he recovered himself sufficiently to say, surprisingly, “I am.”

  Bridget had looked as if she were bursting to say something in his defence, but she had restrained herself and just blown her nose instead. Felicity hadn’t meant to feel sorry for either of them and found she was sorry for both. When she left, Bridget had kissed her unexpectedly and said she knew a frightfully good woman for curtains, immensely reasonable and very quick.

  “I’ve always made my own—”

  “Perhaps this time,” Bridget said, “you deserve not to have to.”

  Felicity had gone across the close, musing on this. Had Bridget tried to say she understood Felicity’s feelings and admired her courage, or had she even gone so far as to hint that she thought Hugh wrong in selling the house? Whichever, it made her feel gentler towards the Cavendishes than she had since her return, and more determined than ever to make of her new house a symbol of some kind of fresh start. When she had finished bemusing Stanley Vigors, she went lightly home, to find Sandra Miles crying in her drawing room, with Alexander hovering over her with a bottle of sherry and a crumpled snuff handkerchief. He looked unspeakably relieved when Felicity came in.

  “My dear Sandra—”

  She tried to get up from her chair.

  “Oh Mrs. Troy, I’m so sorry to behave like this, but I thought I must tell you in person and then I just couldn’t—”

  “Couldn’t?”

  “Help myself,” Sandra said with difficulty.

  Alexander put down the handkerchief and poured sherry into a tumbler.

  “Oh Mr. Troy, I couldn’t drink all that—”

  “Well, try. Drink a bit, anyway. It’s really very good news Sandra has brought, although it’s sad for us. Her fiancé has been promoted and is being sent to the head office in Reading, so of course, after they are married in December, Sandra will wish to go with him.”

  “I’ve been so happy here,” Sandra said. “I’ll never have such a lovely job again. I mean, of course I’m proud of Colin doing so well, but it’s really come as the most awful blow. I did wonder whether to postpone—”