The Chorister at the Abbey

by Lis Howell

  In the dark Suzy couldn’t see the way Alex’s jaw dropped. What on earth was going on? Robert Clark was married to Mary, wasn’t he? The love of his life? Who was this bright, spiky blonde woman?

  ‘Well, I’m off,’ Suzy said. ‘It’s been nice to meet you. There aren’t many laughs at Fellside Fellowship. I bring my son here most Sundays and get glared at by the vicar’s wife!’

  Alex felt as if she had been punched in the chest. She smiled vacantly, turned sharply away from Suzy and narrowly missed being hit by Freddie on his bike, as he wheeled in a magnificent uncontrolled arc out of the Fellside Fellowship car park.

  Robert Clark couldn’t sleep. He was staying at the Traveller’s Hotel in Islington for his creative writing course, and the noise of the heating plus the fact that his room was next to the lift shaft kept him awake. He told himself it was those things, but he really suspected it was his mental state. He had been wretched ever since the coolness with Suzy started, and found it really difficult to try and write anything. Using his imagination was certainly out, so he’d tried ‘faction’ but that wasn’t working either.

  ‘Ouch!’ He had rolled over and hit his head on the book he had been reading, which crashed off the bed. It was no good. He switched the bedside light on and got up, ostensibly to go to the loo, but really because he was restless. He stood by the window and drew the curtains back. Below him the city lights peppered the night. He felt guilty because he was literally around the corner from Suzy’s best friend Rachel Cohen, but he hadn’t called her. Rachel was too perceptive and would have known at once that something was wrong. But he had felt obliged to have dinner that evening with his sister who lived in Hendon.

  ‘So are how are things with Suzy?’ his sister had asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he had said.

  ‘I thought it was serious.’

  ‘It is serious. But I don’t know what to do next.’

  His sister had raised her eyebrows. ‘That’s not like you,’ she said archly. ‘You always have things under control.’

  He had squirmed a little. There was a sort of conceit about believing that you could act as a counterbalance to people in turmoil. Now he was in turmoil himself. Suzy had destabilized him. It was as if she had seen through his vaunting of marriage and exposed it to a searchlight. Did she suspect that he was a hypocrite? Did she guess that his commitment to Mary had really been less than a hundred per cent? He could hardly bear to acknowledge it even to himself.

  Instead, he thought about Edwin Armstrong. Edwin was a calm type as well, but unlike Robert his even-temperedness seemed the product of detachment. Robert remembered when Edwin had been seeing Marilyn Frost, the stunning sister of the Frost brothers. She was the eldest child in the rambling Frost family, the scourge of the neighbourhood. She had enrolled to do music at the college, and was one of those students whom everyone knew, because of her looks and her family’s notoriety. She must have been about twenty, Robert thought, and Edwin in his early thirties.

  Edwin’s quiet joy at being with Marilyn stifled any scruples people might have had about the age gap. It was as if he couldn’t believe his own luck. Robert remembered seeing them at Norbridge Abbey once, and Marilyn’s face had been shining with delight, her hand holding Edwin’s tightly. Edwin hadn’t been able to take his eyes off her.

  And then Robert had heard that she had gone away. It was when Mary was terminally ill and he hadn’t given anyone else much thought. No one had known why the split had happened and there was something about Edwin’s despair that stopped gossip in its tracks.

  Robert went to the bathroom and then back to the window. London. He loved it, but Tarnfield was his home. How long would Suzy stick it? he wondered. She had been living in the country for four years now, but it wasn’t her natural habitat. Much of her work was in Newcastle and Manchester, and she spent hours on the road. He knew she always rushed home to him, giving up the after-work drinks and the occasional parties. They did silly things together which he hadn’t done for decades and until recently the bad temper never lasted. There had never been that sense of walking on eggshells which Robert had mistaken with Mary for the empathy of love.

  He had really tried hard to make his wife happy, that was for sure. But Robert knew that the version of his married life which he had given Suzy had one or two factual gaps in it. For Mary’s wonderful husband had not been so wonderful, really. Robert had been unfaithful to her more than once. Five times actually. And though they were usually one-night stands between consenting adults, on one occasion he knew he had behaved badly. He had tried to forget it. But his rows with Suzy had exposed the double standards of his own position. He knew that if things were ever going to be right with her, he had to sort them out for himself first. Then he would need to face the music or the mockery at home. He wasn’t sure which would be worse.

  Either way, it wouldn’t be pleasant, and Suzy would have every right to tell him to take his sanctimonious sentiments about marriage – and stuff ’em.

  23

  Many oxen are come about me: fat bulls of Basan close me in on every side. Psalm 22:12

  The same evening, Edwin sat in the box room which Morris Little had used as a study. Morris’s hobbies were scattered arbitrarily around. Local history, family history, genealogy, choral singing. He had a bank of folders and about a dozen books all dealing with local families and heritage.

  There was a newish computer but there was a lot of redundant equipment which Edwin thought must have been junked from the shop. He had one of those old fax machines that photocopied on a roll of thin paper.

  There were racks of files and a small sample of fiction from an author who wrote robust stuff about Victorian rogues. Edwin picked out a paperback called The West Coast Pirate, and flicked through it while waiting for Norma to come upstairs with the coffee she had promised. Adventure stories for all ages. Sandy McFay, originally from Cumbria, writes well-researched rattling good yarns, he read on the inside sleeve. Very Boy’s Own stuff, the sort of thing that was coming back into fashion. The North Country was good at claiming its own, but he had never heard of this chap. Presumably he never came back these days or he’d be roped into readings and signings and talks. But it explained Morris’s interest.

  Norma came in with the coffee.

  ‘What was Morris’s password?’ Edwin asked.

  ‘Norbridge – that was his real love.’ Norma smiled a little grimly.

  Edwin felt uncomfortable as he went through the process of logging on as if he was Morris. The desktop icons littered the screen.

  ‘The stuff he was working on is in My Documents. I’ll leave you to look at them.’

  ‘That’s fine, Norma. I’ll print out all his research stuff and then I’ll tell you what I think.’

  He didn’t know where to start, but, trawling through the document files, he soon found a pattern. Morris had written an enormous amount on old Norbridge, but when Edwin keyed in Norbridge with music a whole new tranche of material appeared. Most of it looked like pretty accessible local information. Norbridge Clogdancers, Norbridge and Area Silver Bands, the History of Norbridge Abbey Chorus, and so on.

  There was nothing to confirm Norma’s belief that Morris’s latest research was special. But Edwin remembered Morris’s assertion that there was a local connection with Sir John Stainer, composer of The Crucifixion. He typed Norbridge, Stainer, and music into the search engine, and instantly it scrolled on to the screen: Norbridge and the Stainer Connection.

  Edwin read it with increasing fascination. Morris quoted at length from the letters of John Stainer to Cecil Quaile Woods, vicar of Fellside from 1860 to 1881. Edwin had never heard of these letters, which astonished him because he knew all about Quaile Woods from a musical point of view. He’d been a pioneering Anglican clergyman and fringe member of the Oxford Movement who’d come up to Cumbria. He’d started like the early Puseyites as an ascetic, and been Father to the depressed ports of the coast which were already past their peak in
Irish trade. He set up various missions and charities for the poor. Then at the age of fifty in 1881, he’d suddenly made the odd downward move to the village of Uplands as curate. The church there was much more part of the related, but aesthetic, even indulgent High Church fashion. There Quaile Woods had started to write his psalm chants. He had been praised for them in newspaper and church articles of the time, but most of them were missing, though others had become quite famous.

  So if Stainer and Quaile Woods had written to each other regularly that certainly could be the connection which Morris had been going on about so mysteriously. But like a lot of amateurs Morris had failed to annotate his work. Where were the actual documents? The real letters? And the rest of his source material? It was infuriating. Typical Morris!

  Edwin jumped up and started to look at all the hard copy Morris had accumulated. While Morris’s computer filing system was predictable, his documents were filed in a totally idiosyncratic way. But the letters between Quaile Woods and Stainer had to exist somewhere unless Morris had invented them. It occurred to Edwin that they might have already been referred to by one of the many other local historians in the area, and that Morris might have been quoting another writer. He remembered that during his own research he had discovered that the Norbridge Local History Society had referred to Quaile Woods in a pamphlet in 1976. They had a website. Edwin Googled them, accessed it and reread the excerpts on the site. There was nothing about Stainer. So where had Morris come across the Stainer connection? Was there more about it in the 1976 pamphlet if you read the whole thing? Did Morris have a copy filed somewhere in this mess?

  There was a pile of old material on the top shelf of the bookcase. Morris’s idiosyncratic system nearly eluded Edwin, but at last he found the pamphlet filed not under Q or under N but under P – presumably for pamphlet. And here was the answer. The 1976 pamphlet was based on a much older book which was quoted lavishly, all about Quaile Woods’ sterling character and great achievements, compiled in complex Edwardian style by someone called Henry Whinfell and published just after the First World War.

  But Edwin had never heard of this biography. It would have been of limited interest even when it was published, and any copies had long since disappeared.

  He was aware that Norma was standing by the door.

  ‘You’ve been here hours! I knew he was on to something!’ Norma said with satisfaction. ‘That’s why he wanted to meet you and talk to you about it. That’s what I told you!’

  ‘Me? I thought he just wanted to talk generally.’

  ‘Oh no, he was planning to meet up with you. He told me the day before he died that he was writing it all for a document to take to the Music Department at the college along with some old papers. He must have meant you. You’re the only person he knows from the Music Department. Didn’t he email you?’

  ‘If he did, I didn’t get it.’

  Norma was looking expectantly at him.

  ‘Go into his emails. I’m sure he said he’d emailed the college.’

  With some reluctance, Edwin reopened Morris’s email account. But Morris had not been planning to meet him. To Edwin’s astonishment, he saw that the last email Morris Little had ever written had been sent to Wanda Wisley. And with it was a hefty attachment. It was the same document that Edwin had already accessed: Norbridge and the Stainer Connection. But the covering note, written in Morris’s unmistakable style, read:

  Dear Miss

  Wisley, I’ll be able to pop over to the college as arranged this evening. I’d rather keep our meeting confidential as there are certain people who are rather up themselves and think they know everything about our music making in Norbridge. Quite frankly they tend to take all the credit.

  It just so happens that I’ve come across something which proves my point that our own Cecil Quaile Woods was a very intriguing man who wasn’t all he seemed. I’d like to show it to you.

  Morris Little

  ‘Can I print all this stuff out?’ Edwin asked Norma. She nodded. He highlighted the whole of Morris’s correspondence file and pressed the print key. ‘Look,’ he went on, as the printer whirred into action, ‘there’s far more here than I can sort out now. Can I take it with me?’

  ‘All right.’ But Norma was pleased. Her smile had lost some of its bitter edge. ‘I told you!’ she said, her voice now mellow.

  Edwin got away from Norma as quickly as he decently could and drove to the nearest pub. In the car park he sat for a minute to go over his thoughts. His boss Wanda Wisley had a lot of questions to answer, he thought. But had he the nerve to put them to her?

  Then his mobile rang. When he saw the number on the screen his heart leapt up and down. It was a number he knew but rarely saw. Yet he had been expecting this call.

  ‘Hello, Marilyn,’ he said. ‘At last!’

  At the same time, Freddie Frabrikant was whistling in the dark as he cycled down from the Bible study course. The thought made him stop in mid-rendition of Van Morrison’s ‘Moondance’ in honour of the silver light coming out from behind the black sooty night clouds. He laughed out loud. These weird English phrases! But he wasn’t ‘whistling in the dark’ in the metaphorical sense. Far from it! His life had suddenly come together in this remote rural part of a grey and windswept island.

  He’d come to Britain after his own album had done well, but not that well, in Germany. It had been mainly heavy rock but had nodded in the direction of melody with some old-type numbers with an all-female backing group humorously called Die Jungfrauen, The Virgins. Maybe that was why, in the Abbey, Freddie had noted that quotation from Psalm 45.

  He laughed, remembering the past. A bit of misguided philandering with two of Die Jungfrauen who weren’t, had sent Freddie scurrying to Britain. He’d joined an old friend on the British music scene in a band called The Cut. He’d done all the usual things, including working and playing hard, and he met Wanda when he was recording with the band one Saturday night. The takes had gone on and on all afternoon, with the other members of The Cut making endless changes. Freddie had great hearing, and was a technical artist in the studio himself, so he had little patience with the musical fumbling that was going on. Bored, he had started to talk to the attractive but crabby woman in a very short skirt and crazy trainers waiting hunched at the back of the control room.

  ‘I’m pissed off,’ she’d said suddenly. ‘Shall we leave these dope-heads, and go and find some hard liquor?’

  Wanda had been waiting for her boyfriend who was the producer. Swaddled in his headphones and the chords of The Cut, he hadn’t noticed when she and Freddie sneaked out.

  Ten minutes later the drummer had asked, ‘Where the fuck’s Freddie?’

  They’d realized that Wanda had gone too, and that neither of them was coming back. The two of them got completely ‘arseholed’ in a nearby Soho bar. It was the beginning of Freddie’s relationship with Wanda and the end of his relationship with The Cut.

  And they’d rubbed along ever since, especially as at that stage Wanda was hard-nosed, determined to hang on to her new man, and she was earning good money. There were trips to the US for Freddie as he did sessions for various named bands with her encouragement. Wanda worked at the BBC as a studio manager and studied at Birkbeck College part-time, landing an MA and eventually a PhD on how percussion music was therapy for some disturbed young people. Conferences, papers, occasional media inter- views followed. They both did well, with Wanda eventually becoming the presenter of a radio show herself.

  But nothing lasts forever. When Wanda told him that her radio series had failed to be recommissioned and that she was applying for a teaching job in some remote province he had never heard of, Freddie secretly thought it would be the end. He’d accompanied her to Norbridge just to mark time, until he decided what to do.

  But he loved it! He loved the smattering of New Age culture, the therapists and craftsmen in crumbly old cottages, plus the close-knit – almost defensive – middle class of a small town. The professionals quie
tly admired him and were rather proud that he’d come to live among them. Their kids were at the college, and the parents would stop him in the town to confide about their own long-lost ambitions to be rock stars.

  And the countryside too! He had meant it when he’d said to Wanda one day that he would be interested in moving further out into the country, maybe buying one of these big old farm buildings or failed hotels or abandoned factories, and doing something with it. Of course he wasn’t going to be a farmer or anything like that. This wasn’t a character transplant. He needed a place that was a bit crazy, Gothic maybe, with room for his own studio.

  In fact, the derelict convent was just the sort of thing. He stopped his bike and looked over the wall at the drunken stone cross which lurched at an angle in the overgrown garden.

  ‘Let’s have a look-see,’ Freddie said aloud.

  He ignored the big wooden gates, which were jammed shut though they looked as if they would break up at his touch, and vaulted over the disintegrating brick wall, hearing the gravelly sound of dried masonry fragmenting under his big hand as the weight of his body swung across it. He landed with a squelching bump, to the crushing sound of thick vegetation being squashed underfoot. The weeds in the garden were higher and damper than he’d expected. He crept slowly through the wet tangled leaves and stems towards the broken windows. He tried to get high enough to peer in for a few minutes.

  And then he listened. For a minute, he thought that his leap had caused the whole of the wall to crumble in a delayed action, slowly and almost rhythmically. He stood stock still, and strained to make out what he was hearing. The sound was like water bumping out of an old faucet, or the consistent thump of falling rocks.

  Then he realized that he was hearing something bigger than the collapsing of the brick wall. It was certainly falling, cracking and tumbling in a cascade of drumbeats, but on top of that was a sort of rasping, whooshing noise, inhuman but somehow organic, punctuated by deep groans. He turned around.