The Choir (28 page)

The taxi to the station took him, with unintentional unkindness, along Blakeney Street. The house looked very blank, the windows empty of flowers or cat. He had a sudden clutch of fear that she might just up and off and he would never know, but he thought of the necessity of Henry’s return to the choir and to school. Henry was at last an anchor—wasn’t he? Panic at going overtook the relief.
Leo screwed round in his seat and watched devouringly the amiable brick facades of the Blakeney Street houses dwindle behind him.

“Forgotten something?” the driver said.

“Probably. I forget things all the time—”

At the station, he discovered the train was delayed half an hour. He bought a writing pad and envelopes from the bookstall, and took them to the cafeteria and settled himself in a corner, hedged about with his luggage—“I could have lent you something suitable, you know,” Cherry Chancellor had said, eyeing his battered grips and holdalls—and wrote furiously.

“Sally, darling Sally, I’m going away for a couple of weeks, on a job. I meant to say nothing of it, just to go, but I find I can’t. I’m at the station. I just want you to know that I do understand what you are afraid of, the losing of ‘I’ to become ‘we.’ Of course it’s a price to be paid, a kind of gamble, but you don’t get the big prizes without it. And remember that the ‘I’ of you will be safe with me just as the ‘I’ of me will be with you. ‘I’ want to live with you, not own you or exploit you. We can only live half lives without love, but I think you know that. Cherry has my keys and all my telephone numbers—stupidly I’ve given her my only list.”

He wanted to write “Ring me, ring me” but he stopped himself. Instead he just wrote “Leo,” and his name looked bald and sad there, alone at the end. He put the letter in an envelope, addressed it, and persuaded the woman in the newspaper kiosk to post it for him.

“Important, is it?”

“Very—”

“OK, dear.”

They were announcing his train. He thrust twenty pence at the newspaper woman, gathered up his bags again, and dashed for the platform. The train was full. He was forced to pile his luggage in the swaying section between two carriages and to settle himself there somehow, his back against the lavatory wall while the train drew slowly away from the cranes and the tower blocks and the terraces and the cathedral, riding high and imperturbable above them all.

*   *   *

A disc jockey on Radio Two liked Henry’s recording of the shepherd boy’s song. He played it every morning for four mornings and then, because of the clamour of calls begging to hear it again, he played it twice on the fifth morning. Nicholas and Mike went down to the plant at Wimbledon and cajoled them into pressing five thousand extra copies and then, a week later, ten thousand more. Three national newspapers came to Blakeney Street and took photographs of Henry and Mozart, and then a television programme asked for him. Sally said no. Henry was outraged.

“Mum, please,
please
, why not, it’ll sell heaps more—”

“It’s bad for you. You’re too young and your voice isn’t even finished yet.”

“But I promise I won’t get big-headed, I promise, just once on telly—”

“Television. No, Henry.”

He whined a little.

“I’ll ask Dad—”

“It’s nothing to do with him,” Sally said without thinking. “You are eleven, singing in the choir is serious, your voice is serious. Because you’re a pretty boy you’ll just become a sort of silly toy for the public.”

He was very angry with her. He went upstairs and chucked things about his room for a while and then kicked his bean bag too hard and split a seam and a million uncatchable little white granules rolled out and ran everywhere. He tried to scoop them up in his toothmug but they were light and elusive and blew away from him and clung to his curtains and bedclothes. He began to cry, out of excitement and frustration. He cried as loudly as he could, swooshing the granules about with his feet so that they swirled up and stuck to his socks. Sally stood at the bottom of the stairs and listened to him, restraining herself from going up. After fifteen minutes or so, blotchy with tears and speckled with mysterious little white bobbles like some kind of fungus, he came downstairs and said with difficulty, “Would you just ask Mr. Beckford?”

“Mr.
Beckford
—”

“Please.”

“If he thinks you should, I wouldn’t agree with him, Henry.”

“Just ask him—”

“As long as you understand what I’ve just said.”

He nodded and then came tiredly over and put his arms round her. She said, holding him in return, “R.I.P. one beanbag?”

“Sorry—”

“Doesn’t matter. We mustn’t fight over this wonderful old voice, you know.”

He said, “It’s not just about me—”

“I know. But I don’t want you being exploited. It’s fun at the beginning and then it’s exhausting and then you miss it when it stops. Henry—”

He looked up at her.

“Don’t cry,” he said sternly.

She shook her head. “No, no—”

“
Will
you ring Mr. Beckford?”

There was a pause.

“All right.”

Henry drew away, comforted.

“You don’t like him anymore, do you. But he’s nice.”

Sally rang Chapter Yard. There was no reply. She rang later in the day and again in the morning and this time Cherry Chancellor, who had gone in to be neighbourly about Leo’s domestic disorder—a generosity inspired by seeing Martin, if only temporarily, in what she considered his rightful place—answered it.

“Oh, he’s away,” she said complacently to Sally. “He’s gone north to record in some stately homes. Didn’t he tell you?”

“No—”

“How odd. Well, you know how chaotic he is. But I expect he’d be pleased to hear from you.”

“I need,” Sally said with rigid self-control, “to talk to him about Henry. I need his advice. About a television interview.”

“My
word
. You will have to be careful he doesn’t get spoiled. Would you like to speak to Martin about it?”

“Thank you but as Mr. Beckford was in charge of the recording I must speak to him.”

Cherry’s voice grew frosty.

“I’ll ring you back when I’m back at home with the numbers.”

Henry was sitting at the table painting a model aeroplane.

“Was that Ianthe?”

“Ianthe? No, it was Mrs. Chancellor. Why should it be Ianthe?”

“She’s there quite a lot.”

“But it’s midweek—”

“She doesn’t do ordinary things,” Henry said, and after a pause, “Hooper really likes her.”

Cherry left it until teatime to telephone with Leo’s numbers. She gave them to Henry, who wrote them down painstakingly with a purple felt-tipped pen but without noting which one applied to where, so that Sally had to make three calls—she was very nervous—before she tracked him down. A pleasant woman’s voice at the far end said he was actually recording right now but that she would give him the message and ask him to ring back. Sally could settle to nothing. When the telephone rang, she let Henry answer it and it was Chilworth, wanting him to share some tennis coaching, and then it rang again, and it was her mother to say she would be in Aldminster tomorrow and would return all the things Henry had left behind.

“I can’t imagine how he’s managed with only one sandal, I must say—”

“He’s got other shoes—”

“And little James left a tin of some dreadful hair spray. He seemed such a nice boy. I wonder if his mother knows.”

After that the telephone was quite silent. At nine, Henry went up to bed and Sally went to talk to him to show the telephone she didn’t care. At ten, she had a bath on the principle that if you are longing for a call, it will come only when it is really inconvenient to take it, and at eleven, she went downstairs and laid breakfast round the bits of Henry’s aeroplane. She lay awake until one in the morning, very miserable, and then slept fitfully, to be woken at seven by Leo ringing from Derbyshire.

“Sally? Oh, Sally, I couldn’t ring last night because we were still at it until after midnight and I thought you’d be asleep. Did you get my letter?”

“Your letter? You
wrote
to me?”

“Yes, when I left. In a panic. I gave it to some stupid woman to post. Sally?”

“Yes—”

“It’s so wonderful to hear you. I’ve been hoping and praying you’d ring, after you got my letter—”

“But I didn’t—”

“I love you,” Leo said. “D’you know that?”

She nodded furiously.

“Sally? Are you there?”

“Yes.”

“Are you crying?”

She said angrily, “I
keep
crying—”

“I wish I was with you,” he said fiercely. “It’s all wrong, my being here and you there. I can’t believe you wanted to ring me, I can’t get over it—”

“To be truthful, it was about Henry. But to be even more truthful, I wanted to. When will you be back?”

“At the weekend. I’d come
now
if I could.”

“I had an awful call from Alan. He’s so
untouchable,
you can’t make him mind about anything. I went berserk afterwards. How
could
I be married to a man like that?”?

“Why didn’t you ring me?”

“I tried to. You weren’t there. And then in the morning I couldn’t.”

“But yesterday you could.”

“I had an excuse. Henry’s had a television offer.”

Leo transmitted himself instantaneously from lover to choirmaster.

“Absolutely not.”

“That’s what I said.”

“It would wreck his voice, overexpose it, get him into bad habits. He’s got at least two years to go before he’s ready and even then I’ll object.”

“The record’s doing wonderfully. It’s being a sort of hit—”

“Heavens,” Leo said, “really?”

“I promised Henry I’d ring you and ask—”

“Give him a clip on the ear from me and say Mr. Beckford gives it the big no.”

“All right,” she said happily.

“Meet me. Come to the station on Friday.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes—”

She felt lifted, flying.

“Till Friday—”

She put the telephone down with infinite care. Henry came in and flumped himself down across her.

“I’ve got all those bobbly white things in my bed and now they’re inside my p.j.’s—”

“Mr. Beckford says no.”

Henry eyed her.

“Did he?”

“Actually he said to give you a clip on the ear as well as no.”

“Sounds familiar—”

“Sorry, Henry.”

He leaned across her and twiddled the knobs on her bedside radio.

“
Not
Radio One, please—”

Henry’s voice, clear and mysterious, sang out at them suddenly from some anonymous station. Henry’s hand froze on the knobs. He turned to look at Sally and they regarded each other with awe.

Nicholas Elliott, feeling his emotions all over in a gingerly sort of way, thought that he was happy. Steven and Jon had both left the company, and although that meant their capital had gone with them, Ikon seemed to be doing so well that its bank manager, a man who prided himself on his nose for the right kind of private enterprise, had increased their loan with no trouble. Mike had doubled Nicholas’s salary and had moved in with a currently much-sought-after model, so that Nicholas had the temporary loan of the flat. With his slowly increasing confidence and visibility, he began to make friends, and Mike, who remained half embarrassed to have had anything to do with the Aldminster world, was only too happy to allow him the credit for Henry’s record, selling not only at a
steady rate but selling far better than anything Ikon had produced before. Even to Nicholas, peering anxiously in the mirror for signs of the cool image he hoped for, it was noticeable that his air of weedy vacuity was diminishing. He took a couple of girls out, he gave a handful of interviews, he was asked to parties without Mike or Ianthe. Everybody asked him about Henry’s next record, told him he must cash in on this newly tapped vein of appreciation for a quality oddity. He realized that he wasn’t just enjoying things now, but that he looked forward to them as well. A high moment came when a school leaver from Ealing was taken on to sit in the office in the Charing Cross Road and take the telephone calls. It rose even higher when, dropping into the office on the fifth day of the boy’s employment, he discovered there had been four calls for him alone. He was friendly to the boy; he remembered his own time there too clearly not to be.

He didn’t see much of Ianthe. She was on a real high and out all the time. Like Mike, though not for the same reasons, she was generous in giving Nicholas the credit for “Singing Boy,” in her case because she wanted to strike a bargain with him. She said that she wanted to be the one to break the news of the sales figures to Leo, she wanted to go down to Aldminster alone. Nicholas found that he minded that. The choir, Henry’s choir, was
his
choir too. He wanted to see Leo look at him with something other than his weary half-smiling pity. He had even visualized a rather emotional interview with the bishop. But he was no match for Ianthe, and he wasn’t going to push his luck; Leo was too intelligent to give all the praise to Ianthe. Leo and Ianthe. Nicholas didn’t know what to make of that but he didn’t like it. He couldn’t think what Leo had been about, making up to Ianthe; she’d probably chucked herself at him—she was like that.

Two days after the rights in the record had been sold to America, France, and Italy, and the English sales had topped a hundred thousand, Ianthe went down to Aldminster. She travelled first class, and bought a glossy motoring magazine to choose the car she would now buy when she had learned to drive. Ikon had suddenly acquired an accountant, a friend of Mike’s father’s, and he had been very
stern with them and said not one single Mini, let alone a Porsche, until he was sure they understood what they were doing and he was sure about their financial position. In her mind Ianthe had pooh-poohed him, because she was so close to her own goal it made her reckless. She smoked long American cigarettes in the train and flipped the pages of her magazine and knew with pleased certainty that people were looking at her.

She took a cab straight to Chapter Yard and sent her case on to the deanery in it. Leo was at home, alone, looking well and happy, and she liked it that he didn’t kiss her at once but was pretty cool and stood back for her to go into the sitting room. It was tidy and there was a vase of marguerites on the coffee table.