The Choir

by Joanna Trollope

  “Oh no,” Alexander said hastily, “you mustn’t do that.”

  Felicity sat down by Sandra.

  “You can always come and see us. Your mother’s here, after all.”

  Sandra looked at her and then said in almost a whisper, “I know it’s for the best. Really—”

  Felicity said gently, “Yes.”

  “Look, I don’t want to drink by myself,” Sandra said. “I feel ever so silly—”

  “Are there two more glasses? We ought to toast Sandra’s future.”

  “Of course,” Alexander said. “I’ll go and get some.” He paused. “There’s quite a lot to toast, in fact—”

  When he had gone, Sandra said, “I feel everything’s breaking up, Mrs. Troy, I can’t help it. I mean Leo’s going and this house and now I am. It’s a bit scaring. I said to Colin last night that ever since the choir business came up, we’ve all been at sixes and sevens—”

  “But we’ve saved the choir.”

  “Yes,” Sandra said, but her thoughts were clearly on something else. “I know that. I just don’t think anything will be as—as wonderful as it was.”

  Alexander returned with two glasses, filled them, and handed one to Felicity.

  “Now, come on. The future!”

  Sandra gave them both a watery smile.

  “The future,” she said, but her voice was very small.

  16

  IN THE FIRST WEEK OF SEPTEMBER, LEO LEFT FOR SUSSEX AND was, at the last moment, quite stricken to be going. This was not helped by Cherry Chancellor, who was visibly burning to move in behind him, since, although the houses in Chapter Yard were absolutely identical, the left-hand one was traditionally the home of the organist. The new assistant organist, just graduated from Cambridge and dying to begin at Aldminster, came in while Leo was packing his music and said enthusiastically that he didn’t know how Leo could bear to leave that organ.

  “At this moment,” Leo said, “I hardly can.”

  “What do they have the other end?”

  “An 1885 Walker. Very good, of course, of its kind but only forty-eight speaking stops, so I shall miss the size. Nice solo stops, though—”

  He went into the cathedral for his own private farewell to the organ. He simply sat at the console, lightly stroking the ivory of the keys and the thumb pistons and the stop controls. He took his shoes off to feel the pedals better. He had spent hours in that organ loft, probably some of the best as well as the happiest hours he had ever spent in his life, hours in which he had sometimes felt himself so much part of the great central life force of humanity because of the music he was making that he had been moved to tears. It was a terrible parting. He had no wish at all to relinquish this extraordinary instrument, at once passionately human in its capabilities and superbly indifferent in its historic permanence, into the hands of anyone else. Its vast old personality seemed to engulf him, dwarf him, and at the same time to be withdrawing itself, inch by inch, and holding itself apart, ready for the next man. He drew the beechwood cover down over the console and laid his cheek against it and listened to the huge ancient breathing quiet of the place. He must go. If he stayed any longer, he would hardly be able to.

  Sally helped him to load the car he had bought. She intended, until the house in Blakeney Street was sold, to divide her time between Sussex and Aldminster and Leo and Henry, until all four could somehow—she very much trusted to time in this—be harmoniously merged. She only said ordinary, administrative things to Leo, like “Careful when you pull the duvet out because I’ve filled it with records” and “There’s a bottle of Scotch under the dashboard” but he knew she knew of his state of mind. The removal van dwarfed Chapter Yard, and the piano had to be put in a special crate and circled with mattresses and it seemed to Leo that it groaned as it was wheeled up the ramp. The goodbyes were hard too, and despite having Sally beside him, Leo was filled with a bitter loneliness. Like so many before him, he stood on the stone stairs leading up to the practice room and heard a Bach chorale being broken off and Martin Chancellor’s voice saying, “Now, you didn’t really think about the accent. Did you?” and it took him a long time to open the door and go in. They all stopped when he entered and turned to him their composed musicians’ faces, and although he knew they were, most of them, sorry to see him go, he knew too that their lives would go on, the song would always outlive the singer. He glanced at Henry, and Henry, whose attempts at coming to terms with the new shape of his life were very much impeded by his fundamental liking for Leo, dropped his gaze to the floor. He walked down the room to the piano, said “Excuse me” to Martin, and turned to the men and the boys to say goodbye. Several said “Good luck” and Hooper said irrelevantly that his aunt lived in Sussex and got shushed by everyone else.

  “I want you to enter the Brighton Festival,” Leo said, “so that I can bring my new choir and beat the hell out of you.”

  There was uncertain laughter.

  “I’ll let you get on,” Leo said, moving back to the door. “Mind you make the canticles in evensong the best I’ve ever heard. Or Mr. Chancellor will want to know why.”

  He closed the door behind him.

  “Quiet, everyone,” Martin said. “Now I want each of you bang on the note. One, two—”

  Leo went down the steps. Sally was waiting for him and together they crossed to the palace. Janet Young said she never said goodbye to anyone unless she was sure she was going to see them later in the day, so she wasn’t saying it now.

  “I’m amazed at how much I mind,” Leo said.

  “We all mind,” the bishop said, “but of course you’ll be back—”

  “I don’t think I will.”

  Janet took Sally’s hand.

  “But you’re leaving us a hostage here—”

  “Only for a few days a week. I need her.”

  “I’m hoping to get a job there,” Sally said. “And Henry must come for the holidays. To break us all in.”

  “And now,” the bishop said with just a hint of firmness, “now you are going to the deanery.”

  They all shook hands and Janet and Sally kissed each other.

  “God bless,” the bishop said, and gave a valedictory flourish of his spectacles.

  They went out through the palace gates.

  “This is awful,” Sally said. “Why should it be so painful?”

  “Because you don’t realize how important your human landscape is until bits drop away.” He gripped her hand. “It’s worse when you get older. In your twenties, you never think—”

  “Talking of twenties,” Sally said, “I had a letter from Ianthe.”

  “Oh my God—”

  “I didn’t mean to tell you, but I think I will. I so don’t want us to have no-go areas. She said you had made her believe you were in love with her.”

  Leo stopped walking.

  “And what do you think—”

  “Look at me,” Sally said. She was smiling. “You forget it was me who told you she fancied herself in love with you in the first place.”

  “Sal—”

  “I wrote back. I wrote and told her the best cure for a broken heart was to give it to someone else to mend. It was a phrase I found in an agony aunt’s column. What do you have to say?”

  He kissed the hand he was holding.

  “You know what I have to say.”

  “Just don’t go kissing anyone else. I’m a bit raw on the subject.”

  “If you did,” Leo said, “I’d go bananas. So I know.”

  The dean was out. Bridget opened the door to them with very much less than her customary assurance and led them into the drawing room. The fireplace was filled with Michaelmas daisies and there was a bowl of chrysanthemums on a sofa table, as big as white mops.

  “Hugh does so love flowers,” Bridget said, “I like to keep as many in the house as I can. I’m afraid chrysanthemums really aren’t his favourite and I should so have preferred gladioli but Mr. Cheeseman only had a dreadful salmon pink so I thought
—”

  “I’ve really just come to say goodbye,” Leo said, wondering whither this floral byway tended. “I leave early tomorrow for Sussex. I’d hoped the dean would be in.”

  Bridget spread her hands and shook her head. It seemed to Sally a strangely appealing gesture, incongruous in this well-dressed woman against a backdrop of silver photograph frames containing all her unsuitably, improbably mutinous children. Sally put out her own hand.

  “Would you tell the dean we called?”

  “Of course,” Bridget said, “of course.” She seemed to recollect herself a little. “I do hope you will be very happy in—”

  “Sussex.”

  “In Sussex. Such a pretty county. So lovely to have the sea.”

  “And I hope,” Leo said, with an edge of asperity, “that you and the new assistant organist get on well.”

  A moment of the old Bridget returned.

  “Too extraordinary. He is the grandson of such a dear friend of my father’s. Such a wonderful family, so charming and all very musical. A real coincidence.” When Ianthe was allowed to return to Aldminster she had high hopes of Simon Prescott for her, with his lovely manners and his entirely right sort of upbringing, but those hopes, like so much nowadays, had to remain secret. She smiled stiffly at Leo. “Of course, poor Simon has a lot to do to live up to your playing—”

  Leo did not smile back. He gave a tiny bow and put his hand under Sally’s elbow. Bridget led them back to the front door, opening it to a flood of chatter about the autumn and a new term and so many fresh starts and do mind the second step from the bottom, where Cosmo had accidentally dropped a stonemason’s hammer, Heaven knew why he needed such a thing or where it had come from, but there was a whole half-moon out of the step and the poor archdeacon, only that morning … In midsentence, she shut the door.

  Leo said, “Patronizing old—”

  “No,” Sally said. She was looking back at the closed deanery door with its glossy white paint and brilliantly polished knocker. “She was, but she isn’t anymore. She’s either having, or heading for, a nervous breakdown.”

  “Come on—”

  “I mean it. Perhaps the dean is being horrible to her.”

  “He wouldn’t dare.”

  “Worms turn,” Sally said, “don’t they?”

  They walked back to Chapter Yard in silence. The removal van had finished and driven off, and nothing remained but Leo’s car, and the mattress and sleeping bag Cherry was lending him for his last night. She was in the house, plastic-aproned and rubber-gloved, attacking Leo’s kitchen with a scrubbing brush.

  “You might have waited until I’d gone,” he said mildly.

  “We have to be in by Monday,” Cherry said, scrubbing on, “and you couldn’t put a child in here.”

  “Thank you,” Leo said, but he was too tired to care. He went back into his empty, echoing sitting room and found Sally squatting on the floor, talking to the baby, jiggling idly in its bouncing chair.

  “It smiles.” She dropped her voice. “Luckily it smiles just like its father. Come down to Blakeney Street. You can’t stay here or you’ll get disinfected.”

  Henry was ahead of them. He and Mozart were in their customary places on the floor watching television, and the table was littered with the usual detritus of Henry’s having found himself something to eat, but somehow even Blakeney Street didn’t feel familiar either, as if the house, knowing it was to be sold, was, like the organ, withdrawing itself in readiness for a new relationship. Henry was perfectly friendly. He got up and kissed his mother and said hello to Leo and sorry about all the crumbs but the bread wouldn’t cut properly because of being new.

  “There’s a new probationer,” he said. “He’s called Froggett or something and he’s got kneesocks.”

  “Any good?” Leo said.

  “My goodness,” Henry said, putting his hands in his pockets, “we wouldn’t have him in the choir if he couldn’t sing—”

  Outside the headmaster’s house, a new varnished board with a metal plate screwed to it proclaimed that Aldminster City Council would shortly be opening an advisory centre in the building. Inside, the house was complete emptiness and silence. The house, being Grade One listed, was proving intractable about being made into offices because the rooms could not be altered, the doorways and passages provided a fire-prevention officer’s field day, and the frailty of a great deal of the original plasterwork was making the Historic Buildings people dubious that many areas could actually weather public use. At the town hall, the subject had become a very sore one indeed, and Denis Thornton, only weeks before acclaimed as a public benefactor, found himself now accused of spending three hundred thousand to achieve a personal victory in his vendetta against Frank Ashworth.

  From Back Street, Frank watched it all with more detachment than he had felt in weeks. It no longer seemed beyond the bounds of possibility that he might, some not too distant day, just drive the grey Rover back to the town hall car park, deliver it to Ron for its promised wax, and walk peaceably back up that extraordinary staircase to his old office, past a secretary who, knowing her, wouldn’t even look up from her typing to say, “So you’re back, Mr. Ashworth, are you,” in tones of exasperating matter-of-factness. In the meantime, while he revolved this half-fantasy in his mind, he had Henry. He had even, at Henry’s request, painted his spare bedroom the colour of a chocolate bar, and anything more depressing he thought he had seldom seen, but Henry was entranced. They went shopping together for curtains and posters and an imitation art-nouveau bedside lamp with a pink-petalled glass shade that Henry much admired. When Henry went back to choir practice a fortnight before the official start of term, Frank insisted on collecting him from Blakeney Street and driving him up to the cathedral, which Sally found at once touching and irritating and Henry thought was wonderful because it saved him an uphill walk.

  While Henry sang, Frank paced the cathedral and the close. He went often to stand in front of the headmaster’s house and look, with a certain grim satisfaction, at the imperturbable old soft red façade and the raw new board. When Alexander Troy met him there by chance, he was standing with his arms folded looking up at the house with his head slightly on one side, as if according it an amused and reluctant admiration. He said as much to Alexander.

  “Do you think this old bugger has us all beat?”

  “There’s no justice,” Alexander said, surprised into a perfectly natural reply, “if it hasn’t.”

  Frank turned to look at him and Alexander thought how changed his face was from the weary, beaten air it had worn at their last meeting.

  “Between you and me,” Frank said, recalling with a strange little jerk of pleasure that this man was his Henry’s headmaster, “do you think the dean and chapter would buy it back?”

  Alexander hesitated and then said no, he didn’t.

  “Money?”

  “Yes,” Alexander said quickly, and then added, “no. It’s—too late. It’s too complicated—”

  “Perhaps the council would give the dean a mortgage—”

  “Mr. Ashworth, forgive me, but you are an old schemer—”

  Frank beamed.

  “Force of habit. We learn all the time. I’m not ashamed to admit a mistake when I’ve made one. Can’t the dean do the same?”

  “No,” Alexander said, “in this case I don’t think he can and I don’t think he should be asked to.”

  “Odd—”

  “Not very. Just human.”

  “No,” Frank said, “odd. Here you all are, at loggerheads for months, open war declared over the choir, schemes and deceits, not one with a good word to say for another and now, when you’ve lost the house, and the dean has had a slap in the face over the choir, you all rally round him and say nobody must make life hard for him.”

  Alexander looked away from him, back at the house, but he was smiling.

  “My wife has an image for what has happened. She says that sometimes you plant an acorn, and you plant it in good
faith and instead of finding yourself with an admirable sturdy single oak tree, you’re landed with a terrible mad forest that won’t stop growing in all directions and develops an uncontrollable life of its own. The dean set out to mend the fabric of the cathedral. That’s all.”

  Frank grunted. He looked at Alexander.

  “And you? You’re not bitter?”

  “The reverse. I’ve won what I needed to win.”

  “I shall,” Frank said with a little show of pride, “be helping to take care of Henry this winter.”

  “So I gather. It seems a good solution. And the choir is, oddly enough in this kind of situation, a sort of substitute family. But no more showbiz for Henry just now. One thing at a time.”

  Frank said slowly, “You’ve only to ask, you know, if you think Henry needs anything—”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “I must be getting along to collect him—”

  “Get him a kitten,” Alexander said suddenly. “His cat has to go to Sussex. He’ll find that hard. Get him a kitten.”

  Frank thought about this as he went slowly back into the cathedral. He had never liked cats, but then, he had always thought he didn’t much like children either. Could you have a cat in Back Street? Would it learn to use the fire escape? He walked slowly round the ambulatory, where the hazy sunshine fell through the circling windows in soft dusty bars across the stone floor. He passed the first bishop in his little granite tomb and the marble cartouche of Bishop Fielding’s menagerie—three cats there at least—and the bronze bust of the Victorian bishop who had founded the city orphanage that Frank remembered still going strong in his boyhood. The chapels were all empty, except for flowers here and there, and a solitary grey-haired man in a tweed jacket kneeling in the chapel dedicated to the patron saint of the old country yeomanry. Frank paused to look at him and wonder why he should be kneeling there alone at nine o’clock on a weekday morning, and then the man turned his head slightly to the eastern window, as if instinctively wanting the sunlight to fall on his face, and Frank saw that he was the dean.