The Choir (18 page)

The reporter made a note of this and said could he suppose that the proposal had been thrown out, and the secretary, typing away and not looking up, said she hadn’t the first idea. “Very interesting,” the reporter said annoyingly and then he said, “Keep cheerful, darlin’,” and went down to the Lamb and Flag three doors away, where council gossip was given away free with pints of Protheroe’s real ale. He knew several of the regulars in there and in half an hour had elicited the information he sought, that Frank’s proposal that the city should adopt the choir had been thrown out resoundingly.

It had been the worst council meeting Frank could remember. Three of the younger members—including the one who wanted grief leave awarded to gays and lesbians in council employ who lost their lovers—had actually jeered at Frank, laughing at him with open-mouthed incredulity, in a way he found unbearably insolent. The general opinion was that the cathedral choir was outdated, elitist, and irrelevant to a modern world that did not need superstitious props like religion any longer. The gay supporter then pointed out with smiling malice that Frank had a grandson in the choir and therefore his proposal was blatantly nepotistic. The education officer,
whose ineffectuality in the teachers’ strike Frank had exposed, said with some satisfaction he thought fifty thousand pounds was on the steep side for Frank to suggest as a family favour.

To be gibed at was one thing; to be gibed at cheaply and ignorantly in public in this chamber, which Frank held in more respectful awe than any other room in his life, was intolerable. He had entered it first as a junior councillor just before his thirtieth birthday, and its weighty magnificence of red mahogany soberly gilded here and there with the city and county arms, the memorials to the fallen of two wars, the lettered “1888” above the great clock to date the building itself, had impressed upon him the size and the honour of his responsibility to Aldminster. In thirty years, of course, he had seen rows and heard abuse around that immense horseshoe-shaped table or from the banked seats on either side, but he had seldom, except in the last five years, seen the council lose its sense of decorum. Proclaiming themselves progressives, people had invaded the council merely to abuse, in Frank’s view, their power there, to advance minority obsessions that did nothing to promote the greater good of the greatest number of people in Aldminster. Frank had come to realize with dull horror that many of them actually despised the poor and ordinary they had been elected to defend. And debate had become personal. Frank was ashamed to listen to some of the unprofessional squabbling that now masqueraded as public discussion, and now here he was in the pillory himself, at his accustomed seat halfway down one leg of the horseshoe, being accused, with grinning sneers, of attempting to line his own pocket and advance his grandson’s career.

He could not even make a clean breast of it, and declare that he had allowed the dean to make assumptions about the future of the choir, had allowed the dean to extract his own acquiescence to those assumptions, because he was so eager to break into the charmed circle of the close by buying the headmaster’s house. He had admitted to himself that the headmaster’s house would be a kind of fifth column for the council in the close, but he was not going to admit that in the chamber now, to an audience sniffing for the underhand like rats among garbage. And yet if he did not
admit it, the deduction would be made that he was somehow in cahoots with the dean; indeed that charge was already being levelled at him by a handsome young woman in a scarlet shirt, who was saying loudly from the benches that a man who was happy to entertain Hugh Cavendish in his own home was the kind of two-faced socialist the party could well do without. She had black hair and a bold, rude face and a party of devotees in the chamber roared with approval for her. Frank tried to say something about the city’s heritage inherent in the choir, and she rose to her feet and shouted that “tradition” was a dirty word because it meant no more than the preservation of social inequalities, of which the choir was just one disgusting example. She said “disgusting” several times over, and it was then that Frank, who had always claimed walking out of a meeting was self-defeating, rose slowly and heavily to his feet and walked to the door. As he shut it behind him, someone said, overexcitedly, “There goes the last of the mastodons,” and there was a burst of laughter.

He could have wept. Not for the insult but because of the depths to which the council could plunge, had plunged. It was not only not a great institution anymore, it was hardly an institution at all, presiding incoherently over a city in which too often the young went untaught and the sick un-nursed. He went into his office and stared at his blank blotter and knew himself to be, temporarily at least, both discouraged and bitter. Worst of all, he felt deeply disappointed in himself.

His secretary, a tired, experienced woman who had worked for councils of all political colours over the years, and whom he shared with another senior councillor, came in and asked, would he like coffee?

“No thanks.”

She didn’t ask how the meeting had gone; she never did. Frank had never seen her interest roused by anything at all except the January sales, when she always wanted inconvenient amounts of time off, and royal weddings. She put two buff files away in the steel cabinet beside Frank’s desk and then said surprisingly, “Why don’t you go up to the school, then, and see your grandson. They’re
free around lunch, aren’t they?” and went out. When he passed her three minutes later she was typing as usual and she said, without stopping, “I’ll deal with the chap from the
Echo
.”

“Thanks,” Frank said.

He was puzzled and annoyed to find he would like to have dropped in at Blakeney Street. Heaven knows why, or what he’d say when he got there, and Sally would be at work now in any case. He even walked past the house and noticed that there was a big jar of iris in the front window, with Mozart beside it, keeping an eye on the street, and that the knocker shaped like a dolphin that Sally and Alan had brought back from their Maltese honeymoon, and which he had always told them would get nicked, was spectacularly well polished. On an impulse he wrote, “1:15. Just passing. Frank” on a paying-in slip at the back of his cheque book, and tore it out and folded it up and pushed it through the letter box. Mozart left his windowsill at once to investigate.

He walked on, zigzagging up the streets to the edge of the close, soothing himself with the familiarity of buildings and railings and prospects down alleys. It was cool and grey and still, and all the wine-and-sandwich bars were full and the doors of pubs were open to the pavement, belching beery gusts out into the street. The close was quite full too, with people asleep on the grass or eating out of bags and packets, with knots of teenagers smoking here and there and dogs and toddlers and people on benches reading newspapers trying not to sit too close to each other. The grass was spattered with litter, and the bins were overflowing. The cathedral rose out of it all with a truly superb indifference.

Frank crossed the close by the path that ran directly under the great west window and led on to the Victorian Gothic bulk of the main building of the King’s School. It passed, on its way, the headmaster’s house, at which Frank glanced only briefly, and then stopped at the stone gateway that opened into the school’s impressive courtyard. It was empty, but the windows of the refectory that formed one side were open, releasing a terrific clatter of knives and forks and a blast of institutional cookery. Frank intercepted a boy running towards it and asked where the junior school had lunch.

“Oh, they’ve had it,” the boy said, breathless and eager to push on. “They’re out on the fields now. They eat at twelve-thirty.”

The school playing fields sloped slightly down from the close, away from the city and the estuary. When first laid out, they had been planted with beech and horse chestnut trees and bordered with fields that stretched eastwards to the then village of Horsley. Now houses and low factories and shopping precincts covered the fields, and cricket and football were played against a backdrop of brick. The trees still stood magnificently, and under one particularly tremendous horse chestnut, Henry and half a dozen others were practising back flips.

“Should you be doing that straight after your dinner?” Frank said.

Henry came across to him with unselfconscious pleasure and said, “We didn’t eat it, it was hamburger,
awful
—”

Another boy said importantly, “My mother says it’s all soya anyway.”

“Supposed to taste the same.”

“Well, it doesn’t and we just flick it about—”

“Care for a short walk?” Frank said to Henry.

Henry beamed.

“OK.”

They moved away down the slope.

“Sorry I haven’t been to see you and your mother lately.”

“She said you were busy.”

“Well, that’s always true. But we had a bit of a barney, your mother and me, about the choir. Did she say anything to you?”

Henry stooped for a stick.

“No.”

“What do you feel about the choir? Do you think it’s important?”

Henry swished his stick from side to side like a windscreen wiper.

“Course I do.”

“Why?”

Henry shrugged.

“Because—of the cathedral. And the music. And—and because of God.”

“Do you believe in God?” Frank said.

“Yes.”

“Why do you?”

Henry sighed. This was an awful sort of conversation and not a bit like Frank was usually.

“It’s obvious,” Henry said and his voice had an edge of contempt. “There wouldn’t be any of this”—he waved his stick—“without God, and the cathedral wouldn’t be there in the first place.”

“What about,” Frank said, noticing the contempt and changing tack, “the boys from the state schools in the city who can’t get into the choir like you can?”

Henry gave him a clear glance.

“They can. Harrison was at Horsley Junior and his parents don’t pay fees.”

Frank stopped walking. He was not in the mood, he discovered, for a second defeat within hours.

“How’s your mother?”

“Fine.”

“I saw the cat in the window today.”

“He’s in disgrace. He ate the butter yesterday and this morning he brought in a baby rat and let it go in the big room. We caught it in the dustpan.”

Frank moved on again.

“Sometimes there have to be changes, you know, and you don’t like the look of them. But in the end, you see that they were for the best.”

Henry said nothing. He was thinking of the young rat’s savage little face glaring up at him out of the dustpan.

“Any news from your father?”

Henry said casually, “He might come back in August for a bit.”

“I’d best be getting back,” Frank said. “Just wanted to have a word. Give my love to your mother and tell her I’ll be round soon.”

Henry grinned.

“I called her old girl last night and, oh boy, fireworks—”

“You’re a cheeky monkey.”

“She said ‘Oh
hooray,
Henry’—”

“Come on, monkey, back to your antics.”

Henry reached up and kissed his cheek.

“Bye, Grandpa. Thanks for coming.”

Frank watched him racing back up towards the chestnut tree. He’d a softer spot for Henry than for anyone else in his life, no doubt about that, but right was right, and Henry couldn’t grow up in a society that refused to move. From the common room window a hundred yards away Roger Farrell observed his unmistakable figure coming slowly up towards the school and turned to say with satisfaction to his colleagues, “Here comes our great ally. Shall we all go out and chair him in?”

L
ONDON LIFE WAS NOT AS
N
ICHOLAS HAD IMAGINED IT WOULD BE
. To begin with, everyone—Ianthe, Mike, Steven, and Jon—was always out, seeing people. Nicholas had thought that a stream of rock bands would come through the office and his days would be interestingly taken up with making them coffee and soothing them when Ikon turned them down, but it seemed that deals were done elsewhere and outside recording sessions took up twenty-four hours of each week’s seven days. The office was where the mail came and where Nicholas answered the telephone. When people rang, they usually said, “Is Mike there?” or Steve or Jon or Ianthe, and when Nicholas said he was sorry, they weren’t, but could he take a message, they usually said not to worry, they knew where he’d be most likely, and rang off. Sometimes one of the partners came in and gave Nicholas a master tape, which he had to take off to a studio in Wardour Street to have a lacquer cut. He liked that. He liked watching the cutting head on the lathe at work; it made him feel that something in his life was really happening. When he spent whole days in the office longing to be sent to the cutting studio, or even better the pressing plant in Wimbledon, he felt that nothing was happening at all.

The office was a single room about sixteen feet square with a tiny alcove off it, a lavatory two floors down, and a view of yellow brick walls and fire escapes. The partners had furnished it, in their initial
enthusiasm, with two dark brown tubular desks, cubes of foam furniture upholstered in corduroy, huge plants, and self-conscious lighting. Then they had realized about the need to earn back their investment, and had simply left it to silt up with the disorganized clutter of their business. There were full ashtrays and burn marks on everything, the dark brown carpet was scuffed and gritty, and the leaves of the plants had begun to rattle from drought.

Sighing, Nicholas began to put his matron-taught skills to work. There was nothing to clean with, and a first foray into the Charing Cross Road showed a complete dearth of the kind of shop that sold brushes or buckets. He approached the black woman he met sloshing water on the interminable stairs in the building, who immediately stopped sloshing and gave him all her equipment to clean with and came to watch him while he did it because, she said, she’d never seen a man do such a thing before. He cleaned for a whole day and Jon came in at six o’clock, scattering ash, and sniffed and said, “Weird smell. Any messages?”