The Choir

by Joanna Trollope

  Henry had thought that he would create a fuss, rather, about not being allowed to make a second record; but even if the adults around him seemed anxious to placate him over most things, they were united and adamant about this. Even his father, who had taken his uncomfortable emotional displays back to the Middle East, wrote to him to say he wouldn’t allow it either. Leo said to him that not only had he a lot to learn, but that a record made by a chorister in conjunction with a tiny rock record company being a hit was a chance in a million that they had taken and, amazingly, succeeded in, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you could do twice. Henry was nettled by this.

  “It wasn’t just a fluke—”

  “The unlikely combination of you and Ikon working was a fluke. When Mr. Chancellor thinks you’re good and ready, you can record with a proper professional company experienced in choral music.”

  “But then it wouldn’t be a hit—”

  “That remark,” Leo said, “proves to me that you shouldn’t make another. The rock world is horrible.”

  “What sort of horrible?”

  “Hype, hysteria, and duplicity,” Leo said.

  “What’s—”

  “The answer, Henry,” Leo said, “is no.”

  When he got back to it, Henry could not help noticing that the choir were more inclined to squash him than cheer him. In fact the squashing reached proportions that made Martin Chancellor send Henry out of practice one morning, in order to remind the others that Henry had played a significant part in saving their choral lives. When Henry came back in, his eyes were pink but he kept his head up. As they resumed the “Magnificat,” Wooldridge, who was next to him, slid a packet of chewing gum quietly along the music stand towards him. Gratefully Henry covered it with his psalter and sang on until it was safe to transfer it to his pocket. Harrison had been made head chorister and was briefly being very officious about it, darting disciplinary glances about the room, but he never noticed. The new probationer could hardly see the music on his stand, he was so small, and Harrison’s thirteen-year-old majesty loomed over him as a guide. Henry’s hand closed in relief about his chewing gum in the secrecy of his pocket and he leaned slowly, slowly sideways until his shoulder touched Wooldridge.

  “Henry,” Martin Chancellor said—he had begun to call them all by their Christian names—“Henry, are you too tired to stand up by yourself?”

  “No, sir.”

  “And is Charles too feeble to stand up by himself?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then behave yourselves.”

  Being ticked off, Henry found to his relief, rehabilitated him. The choir, the routine, the discipline, everything went blessedly back to normal. Only home wasn’t normal. Mozart had gone—that had been a parting, however temporary, of true misery for Henry—and every room had a series of wine boxes in it, begged from Quentin Small, that Sally was slowly filling with possessions, hers and Alan’s apart, with a scrupulous, idiotic fairness. People came to look at the house and Henry regarded all of them with hatred; they seemed to love the big room but when they got upstairs they said to each other, “Well, I’d push that wall through to make a decent-sized bedroom” and “Of course the boy’s room would make a perfect second bathroom,” the insensitivity and arrogance of which sometimes reduced him to tears of helpless rage. He tried to punish Sally by taking all his photographs and posters down to Back Street, but three days later he brought them all back again. Frank told Sally she should just go, and let him and Henry sort out life after a clean, final break, but she went on obstinately, sorting and packing, making lists and telephone calls. She wanted to hug Henry a lot, which he liked usually but at the moment felt uneasy about because hugging anyone had become suddenly so much more complicated. When Frank had said gruffly to him that perhaps they’d better not embrace anymore in public, Henry had been truly grateful.

  He spent several nights, for practice, in Back Street. He liked it. At night, because it was a flat, he could lie in bed with the door open and actually see Frank reading in the sitting room, and if thoughts of Mozart and Sally came to him, as they too often did, he could pad through and ask nonchalantly for a drink. Frank said to him one night, “One thing you’ve got to learn is that in this life you’ve got to make your own happiness.”

  This struck Henry because it seemed to him that his life was not of his own making at all, but something other people arbitrarily made for him, happy or unhappy. The notion that he might have his own kind of power was more than pleasing. He lay in bed with a torch and sent its beam whirling in the dark and felt, briefly, mighty. The mightiness, however, could not survive Sally’s first departure for Sussex, two weeks after term began, and he broke down in choir practice, to his infinite chagrin, and had to be comforted ignominiously by Harrison, who saw it as his duty.

  In break, he borrowed ten pence from Chilworth and telephoned his grandfather.

  “I’m coming home from school on my own. I’ve got something to do on the way—”

  He paused. Frank said, “I was going to meet you.”

  “I’d rather come on my own. Everyone else does. I’ll be fine.”

  “Six—”

  “No later.”

  “Bangers tonight,” Frank said, “and you keep your word.”

  After school, he went down to empty Blakeney Street and let himself in. It was oddly quiet, and Sally had turned everything off, so that not even the fridge was humming, and the house didn’t seem to smell quite normal. Henry went into every room and opened every cupboard and drawer and looked at everything in them very carefully before he closed them again. He found two chocolate digestive biscuits and ate them, and the Asterix comic book he thought he had lost, and Sally’s big black sweatshirt he was sure she wouldn’t mind him borrowing. He went into the big room last and played chopsticks on the piano. Then he put the book and the sweatshirt in his sports bag and carefully locked the house up behind him.

  The light outside in the street was dusky blue and there was a little sharp frosty bite to the air. Grasping his bag, Henry set off, not downhill to catch a bus to Back Street, but uphill again, back to the close, through the small streets where he had walked every morning of his school life. The proper shops were shutting and the takeaway-food places and wine bars were putting on their outside lights and opening up, and when he crossed Lydney Street he saw the first hot-chestnut seller of the autumn standing by his brazier outside the pizza place Nicholas had taken him to. The close was almost empty when he reached it, and the grass was turning dark blue in the dusk, specked with white scraps of litter, and the cathedral looked as big as a mountain with just a few lights glowing from the chancel.

  The public door would be shut by now, and anyway, Henry preferred to use the medieval bishop’s door that the choir always used when they came in from the cloisters. Once inside, he leaned against the ancient oak of the door and listened. Someone was playing the prelude to a Bach fugue, but the rest of the cathedral seemed to be quite empty. Henry closed his eyes. It was probably the new organist, because everyone knew Mrs. Chancellor liked Mr. Chancellor to be at home around this time so he could play with the baby before it got put to bed. The prelude came to an end, there was a short pause, and then the organist began on the Agnus Dei. Henry clicked his tongue. Mr. Beckford would not have approved. He had always said that the sixteenth century had got it right by having choral contrapuntal music unaccompanied and he didn’t except his hero, Bach, either.

  Henry left the bishop’s door, and began to walk up the shadowy nave. At the sanctuary steps, he turned left and made his way round the edge of the choir screen to the steps that led up to the organ loft. He left his bag at the bottom in the care of a slim stone angel whose face and folded hands shone from touching, and climbed up to the organ loft and found Martin Chancellor, baby or no baby, alone in front of the console. He glanced in the mirror that hung above it and said without any surprise, “Hello, Henry.”

  Henry crossed the little panelled space and stood behi
nd him.

  “Can you remember this?”

  Henry made a doubtful noise. Martin played peaceably on for a little while and then he said, “Have a crack at it anyway.”

  Henry drew himself up to see the score clearly over Martin’s shoulder and took in an immense breath. The notes came rising up at him out of the organ, swelling all round them both.

  “Ready?”

  Henry nodded, opened his mouth, and sang.

  About the Author

  JOANNA TROLLOPE, a descendant of nineteenth-century English novelist Anthony Trollope, is the author of a number of historical novels and Britannia’s Daughters, a study of women in the British Empire. However, she has become best known for her marvelously readable contemporary novels, often centered on the domestic nuances and dilemmas of life in England. She has now written seven of these novels, and The Choir is the third of them to be published by Random House. Joanna Trollope was born and still lives in Gloucestershire, England.