The Choir (17 page)

“But are those very people not diminished if we lose the
effect
of choral singing in our cathedrals?”

“They are indeed,” the bishop said, “but less so. Nothing is as damaging as a visibly divided Church, nothing shakes people’s faith so badly.”

Alexander got up and walked back to the window. Hargreaves, a hugely grown fifteen-year-old exploding out of his uniform, was apparently having a lesson on dead-heading roses. The pruning shears in his hand looked like nail scissors.

Alexander turned round.

“It will fall apart. And what about the headmaster’s house?”

“Now there,” the bishop said with relief, “I am very clear in my mind. It should indeed belong to the city but under the influence of the close. Let it be a meeting place by all means, but a Christian meeting place.”

“It seems that you agree with me about most aspects of this whole business but you won’t support me.”

“Can’t as well as won’t. But that doesn’t stop me praying for you. In fact, as old Canon Savile used to say, I’ll pray like blazes.” He stood up. “Alexander, what news of your wife?”

“None.”

“How long—”

“Five weeks.”

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

“And will you just wait?”

“Until the end of term. Then I think I’ve fulfilled my side of our unspoken bargain to allow each other room, and I shall go to look for her.”

“Women,” the bishop said thoughtfully, “have an extraordinary power, don’t they. It seems to me very real and excellent but not visionary. Is it?”

“No. Because they aren’t romantic on the whole.”

“Not romantic?”

“No. That’s something I learned from Felicity.”

The bishop said mournfully, “They would make wonderful priests.”

“But a choir of girls would not have the same almost extravagantly uplifting effect as a choir of boys.”

The bishop took Alexander’s arm.

“That particular manifestation of purity, something quite platonic and unearthly, will certainly vanish with the choir.”

“Don’t
speak
of it—”

“All is far from lost, Alexander.”

“It seems to me at the moment that the opposition to me grows larger every day and I correspondingly shrink.”

“Nonsense. You are an enormous figure, I often think far too large for Aldminster. Janet says she can see you as a missionary captain of industry and I know exactly what she means. You, with a little help from above, could move mountains and I am not in the least without hope that you will. Do you want to take Janet’s convicts with you or shall we keep them until she’s finished with them?”

“Oh, keep them, please. This is probably the most constructive hour of Hargreaves’s entire life. He has no idea whatsoever what to do with his ferocious energies and appetites except break things. Furniture simply disintegrates at his approach. Thank you for seeing me.”

“I shan’t forget any of the things we have talked about.”

On the doorstep of the palace Alexander turned.

“Do you think all human endeavour springs from the need to be particular, visible—?”

“Psychologically speaking, probably. Spiritually speaking, it isn’t necessary.” He glanced up. “There is Bridget Cavendish. Our encounter will not now go unrecorded.”

Alexander caught Bridget up twenty yards short of the deanery gate. She was wearing an expensive print frock and carrying a wicker basket full of neat paper bags.

“Just a few salad things,” she said to Alexander. “I can
never
manage to remember everything at one time.”

“I don’t think I ever want to see salad again, just now. It’s Mrs.
Monk’s sole culinary idea at the moment because it’s June, never mind the actual
weather.
”

Bridget beamed.

“My dear Alexander, you must come in and have supper with the dean and me.”

“I don’t think—I should, just now.”

“Nonsense. You ought to hear Hugh’s excellent arguments and we could have a sensible discussion in civilized surroundings.”

Alexander took a step away.

“I’m not the best of company at the moment—”

“No, no. I do understand. So wise of you to go and see the bishop.”

He regarded her with something little short of loathing, bowed, muttered goodbye, and walked rapidly away. She watched him go for a few seconds, then she hurried into the deanery and opened the study door, without knocking.

“Huffo, I’ve just met Alexander Troy coming out of the palace and he has declined to come and dine with us. He can
only
have been to see the bishop about his wretched choir—”

The dean, seated at his desk and writing, did not look up.

“Not necessarily.”

“But, Huffo, why else—”

“Plenty of reasons.”

“And to refuse my invitation!”

“Would you expect him to
accept
it at such a time?”

“Huffo, I am doing everything in my power to be of service to you in this difficult time—”

The dean turned round and looked at her over his half-moon spectacles.

“Then would you be very kind and bring me a cup of tea?”

Sally worked through the third consecutive lunch hour so as to postpone writing to Alan. Her boss, who was wooing the new young barman in the wine bar in Lydbrook Street, was extravagantly grateful about this and promised to reward her amply in her Friday wage envelope. She was a better salesman than he, in any case, and
usually managed to persuade someone who had come in bent upon a copy of Lytton Strachey’s
Pope
—very rare—to take
Elizabeth and Essex
—not rare at all—instead and probably a case of unclassified burgundy as well. She also did housewifely things like beeswaxing the backs of the leather-bound books and putting plants about, and old plates picked up in the Thursday antique market, to make the shop alluring to people to whom second-hand book dealers did not normally appeal Twice she wrote “Dear Alan” on pieces of scrap paper, and the third time, “My dear Alan, even if I were not in love with someone else, I don’t want to be married to you anymore,” and tore them all up. It struck her that Alan might be quite relieved to get such a letter, but then she wondered if she just
hoped
he would be because that would make everything so much easier.

Her one aim was not to cheat on anybody if she could possibly help it, and of course she was cheating on Alan by every day she didn’t write her letter. It was only difficult to write because she didn’t quite know clearly, apart from leaving him, what she was going to do. Leo wanted her to marry him, but she thought she should get used to the idea of not being married to Alan before she thought seriously of marrying anyone else. She was wild about Leo, no doubt of that, and wilder still since he had taken her to bed in his lopsided bedroom in Chapter Yard and delighted her by making love to her rather than just having sex with her, which was what she was used to. To be investigated all over with immense approving interest was as seductive as having her opinions seriously considered. It gave her amazing confidence in herself.

“It’ll wear off,” she said to Leo, “it can’t last, this gigantic enthusiasm.”

“You forget that I really like your character. Be yourself and you’ll find you’re stuck with me. When will you learn? I want what you are, not what I wish you were. Except for married. I wish you weren’t married.”

She didn’t
feel
married. She felt very much Henry’s mother but not at all Alan’s wife. That was the prime thing she must write and say, and then she must say that it was another man who had, so to speak, given her back to herself. Alan wouldn’t have a clue what
she meant, but she didn’t know how else to put it without sounding women’s-libbish, which wasn’t what she felt at all. Alan was likely to become very sentimental about Henry, but she had to steel herself for that and try to refrain from pointing out what a fair-weather father he had always been. She was going, she told herself, to be
fair.

As to Frank, she was so furious with him over the choir, she was going to let him stew in ignorance over Alan. He hadn’t come to tell her, face to face and honestly, about his deal with the dean over the choir and the headmaster’s house, he had just left her to find out by rumour, and so she had stormed down to the flat in Back Street and confronted him.

“And where does your loyalty lie,” she had shouted, “with your grandson or your politics, I’d like to know! You’re not just a cheat but a coward too. You left Henry and me to discover this as best we might. No wonder you haven’t been to Blakeney Street in weeks! Well, this is where we part company, Frank, Henry or no Henry. What do you think it’s like for him to have a grandfather, a public figure, acting like this and trying to get rid of the very body his grandson has just been chosen to join? And all behind our backs!”

A tide of ancient chauvinism rose redly in Frank; his father would have hit his mother if she had spoken to him in such a way. He held his door open for Sally.

“Get out,” he said, “get out before I throw you out.”

They hadn’t spoken since. Henry said once or twice, “Is Grandpa coming?” and Sally had said, absently, to try and indicate that there was nothing significant in his not coming, “He’s up to his ears in work just now. You know what he’s like.” He didn’t go to the cathedral to see Henry enrolled as a full chorister, but if Henry noticed, he made no comment; he was used, after all, to not having a full parental complement in attendance anyway.

Leo said Sally might be misjudging Frank.

“You don’t know what the dean’s like, Sal. Frank may well have found himself in a far more entrenched position than he meant, and because he isn’t used to being outmanoeuvred he doesn’t know how to recover himself. He’s made a mistake and pride won’t let
him say so. I rather admire him. He’s the last of the old city fathers, in essence.”

But Frank was Alan’s father, and in her present frame of mind, Sally did not want to make things up with him. She would tell him when she judged the moment right, just as she would tell Henry. Henry must know nothing until Sally could tell him exactly what was going to happen.

One thing she did feel very bad about, and that was the friendship between Leo and Alexander Troy. They were so angry with each other over Sally that they were scarcely speaking, and this at a time when they needed to speak, because of the choir. Sally had thought of either going away for a while or not seeing Leo but neither idea was really practicable, and in any case Leo had declared often to Alexander that he wouldn’t give up his pursuit of Sally, wherever she was. She liked Alexander so much, and so did Henry, and she wished very hard for Felicity to come home so that he would have someone to confide in. She once suggested to Leo that she should go and see Alexander and try and sort things out, but she chose a poor moment, a moment when Leo was absorbed in thinking about work, and he turned on her the impersonal gaze of an absolute stranger and said there was no point in going, no point at all.

She had so much energy these days, felt so certain of herself, that she thought she could do anything. She cleaned the house throughout, even behind things, and cooked quite complicated food for her and Henry’s suppers, to which his only reaction was to say with mild reproach that he hoped they’d be able to have spaghetti again soon. She took him swimming after school, and went to watch him and Chilworth practise in the nets, and offered herself for spells of duty in the school second-hand shop, which was run by just the committee-minded kind of mother she most disliked. On Thursday afternoons, when the bookshop shut, and late most evenings she saw Leo, and he would sit in the downstairs room with his lap overflowing with Mozart, who approved of him possessively, while they talked and drank wine and he played the piano for her. Only once did Henry come down, in a midnight panic about some French prep he hadn’t done, and although he seemed mildly surprised to
see Leo, his surprise was overtaken by relief that Leo seemed prepared to test him on his vocabulary, there and then, even if it was twenty past twelve.

“And now you can sleep with a quiet mind.
Quest-ce que c’est
to sleep
en
Frog?”

“
Dormir.
”

“And to sleep well?”

“
Dormir bien.
”

“Right, then. Nightmare over. Are you going to take this fat fur character upstairs with you?”

Henry gathered Mozart up.

“Thanks, sir.”

“Sleep well. I’ll see you eight-thirty tomorrow sharp in
very
fine voice.”

Henry grinned. In the morning he said, “Why’d Mr. Beckford come?”

“To talk to me.”

“About me?”

“No, old vanity pots. Just conversation. Friendly conversation.”

“Is he a friend?”

“Yes. A very good one.”

Henry squirmed.

“It’s a bit funny to be friends with a
master
—”

“Oh? Aren’t masters allowed to be people too? Anyway he isn’t a master.”

“He’s like one,” Henry said and then added, “He’s OK, though.”

“Gracious of you.”

Henry had a letter from Alan that morning, the first to him alone for over three months. He seemed oddly indifferent to it, didn’t want to open it, and when Sally slit the envelope and handed it to him, he looked at the first line or two and said rather vaguely that he’d read it later. When he came downstairs after brushing his teeth, ready for choir practice, he tore off a corner of the envelope to take the Saudi stamps to Hooper. Sally said, “Go on, take the letter to read in break,” but she found it later on the little table in the hall, which they both used as a kind of pending tray. She read
it. It was a breezy account of camel racing and said at the end, “Take care of Mum, old son, and I’ll see you in the holidays.” August, he meant. Six weeks away. In six weeks she must have made up her mind, told him, told Henry, and told Frank. It was the first chill draught of reality. She went back into the downstairs room to make another cup of coffee and to review her state of mind, and found Mozart on the table contentedly eating the butter.

The
Aldminster Echo
reporter arriving at the council chambers to interview Frank Ashworth about the city’s interesting intention to take over the twenty-four singing boys of the cathedral choir was told that unfortunately Mr. Ashworth couldn’t see him after all. He was quite used to being told this kind of thing and grinned cheerfully and said he’d wait. Frank’s secretary said she hadn’t made herself clear, obviously, Mr. Ashworth had no interview to give the
Echo
, and that was final.