The Choir (3 page)

“I’ve given you a poor welcome,” Alexander Troy said to him later.

“That’s all right, sir.”

“A parent has given me a bottle of whisky. I’m going to have some. Will you join me?”

Nicholas said he would love to. They were in the headmaster’s sitting room, which Nicholas remembered for its three-piece suite covered in fawn cut moquette and a triangular fifties table whose legs ended in yellow plastic bobbles. Now the room looked like the cover of a Laura Ashley catalogue, a rustic, cluttered realization of the Anglo-Saxon idyll, where long sprigged curtains crumpled on to the polished boards of the floor and every corner contained an object of battered charm. Alexander scooped a cat out of a wicker chair draped in a faded patchwork quilt.

“Sit there. It’s more comfortable than it looks. We are so lucky to have this house.”

“I remember the guidebook saying it was the best in the close.”

“It probably is. The plasterwork on the stairs is perfect. You must come and see—the intertwined initials and emblems of the couple the house was put up for in about 1680. Do you like water in this?”

“Please …”

Alexander passed him a tumbler and sat down opposite in a large chair he immediately dwarfed.

“My secretary tells me that you have been rather handed about today like the prize in pass-the-parcel.”

“The dean gave me tea. The bishop was there when I arrived.”

“A lovely man,” Alexander said.

“He didn’t seem a bit stuffy.”

“Doesn’t know the meaning of the word. Did Sandra tell me you were head chorister once?”

“Yes,” Nicholas said, and tears pricked his eyelids. “Yes, I was.”

“My dear fellow—”

Nicholas said desperately, “Everyone is being so
kind
—”

“Yes. They would be. Very difficult for you, though. Being grateful is exhausting work. Have you kept up your music?”

Nicholas shook his head.

“Don’t you miss it?”

“I forgot about it. Then I went into the cathedral and heard them singing some Palestrina this morning and I could remember every note and I missed it so much I nearly fainted.” He stopped and then said abruptly, “Sorry.”

Alexander looked longingly towards the piano.

“Would you sing a bit for me now? A bit of Bach perhaps? I’d like to play—”

“Do you mind, sir, if I don’t. Not right now.”

“I was thinking of ‘Now Let Thy Gracious Spirit.’ ”

“I’d have to try it to myself again in the bath first,” Nicholas said in a tone of deliberate lightness, observing the headmaster’s sudden dejection of face and spirit. “Then I’ll have a go. Mr. Beckford said you were very interested in music.”

“I read music at Cambridge. Then I went to theological college in Wells and now, after various false starts, here I am, most logically. Mr. Beckford is an outstanding organist and much too modest.”

“I wished I was back in the choir, this morning,” Nicholas said. “I
wished
it.”

“Because it was safe?”

“Because when you do it, your life is quite taken up by it, and other people think you are right to do it, because of the music.”

Alexander got up and poured more whisky into both their tumblers.

“It’s the professionalism, isn’t it? Nobody ever questions that. And of course, sacred music always seems to me such a perfect outlet for boys, platonic, unphysical, unalarming yet richly satisfying because it is something they can do so wonderfully.”

Nicholas drooped over his tumbler.

“It’s the only thing I’ve ever been able to do.”

Alexander surveyed his own weariness for a moment and decided he had not the energy to take on the intimacy of his guest’s misery just now. He said instead, “Would you think I was overdoing it if I told you that I believe the choir to be the soul of the cathedral?”

Nicholas looked awkward and said he didn’t know. Alexander got up.

“Don’t worry. I’m not about to catechize you and ask you about the relevance of God to today. But you ask the boys what they think about music and the cathedral. And God, for that matter. Ask an outstanding probationer we have, Henry Ashworth, one of the most promising voices I’ve heard in years coupled with one of the most straightforward personalities.”

With his head bowed Nicholas said in a mutter that he supposed people only believed in God because they were afraid not to, but he supposed music must be a help, he wasn’t sure, really, but it was sort of comforting, wasn’t it …

Poor fellow, Alexander thought, looking down on him, poor lost fellow. He put a hand under one of Nicholas’s arms.

“Time matron was tucking you up and ticking you off. Have you got something to read?”

Nicholas stared at him in despair.

“I don’t read much—”

“Here. Have
Private Eye
.”

“I’m sorry,” Nicholas said. “I’m sorry—”

“What for?”

“Oh, turning up like this, being so hopeless, refusing to sing, not reading, being so
wet
—”

Alexander put a hand briefly on his shoulder.

“Actually, you’re rather a comfort to me. And I’m sure your state is only temporary.”

“Thank you, sir. Good night, then, and thanks for the whisky.”

When he had gone, Alexander went to the piano and played some of the Bach chorale that had been singing in his head for an hour. Then he got up and found a sheet of paper in the waxed elm desk Felicity had unearthed in a junk shop and restored herself, and on the paper he wrote:

Then he tore the paper into tiny fragments, dropped the pieces into the empty grate, and took a third and unwise glass of whisky to bed with him.

“T
HE ASSAULT COURSE WAS FANTASTIC
,” H
ENRY
A
SHWORTH WAS
saying to his mother, “and then we were nearly late for evensong because we lost Hooper and there was only two minutes to get robed up so we just rushed in in our wellies and nobody noticed till afterwards when the dean saw and he said ‘WELLIES!’ in an outrageous voice so it was worth it.”

“Outraged,” said Sally Ashworth absently because she was reading a letter. It was from Henry’s father in Saudi Arabia, where he was on a two-year contract helping with the technical installation in a new hospital outside Jeddah, and it smacked of untruthfulness, as all Alan’s letters now did to Sally.

“So my gown’s muddy,” Henry said. “Can I have a choc bic?”

Sally pushed the tin across the pine table. There was a lurking boastfulness in Alan’s letter. What was it that impelled him to show off his conquests, however indirectly, to the one person he had no business to show them off to?

“I got the top C in the Sanctus today,” Henry said, nibbling neat half-moons out of the rim of his biscuit, “bang on. The assault course was really amazing, my legs are nearly dropping off. Will you help me with my English?”

Sally looked up at him with a gaze heavy with what preoccupied her.

“Have you got a headache?”

“Sort of,” she said.

He put his biscuit down.

“Shall I play?”

“Yes. Oh, yes. Oh, Henry …”

He slid off his chair and padded across the rush matting to the piano.

“Choppers? A prelude?”

“Lovely, anything …”

He began to rummage through the music on top of the piano and said hurriedly, with his back turned to her, “I’m going to be a full chorister.”

“
Henry
!”

“Next month. It’s a special service, me and Chilworth. We get presented to the dean. Better not wear wellies
then
.”

She put her hands on her hips and regarded him, beaming.

“Henry.”

He ducked his head.

“I am so pleased. You can’t think. I knew you would be one day, but not so soon. You’ve only been a probationer half the time Chilworth has. Did you have to have another test?”

“No, thank goodness. Mr. Beckford just said, ‘One test was quite enough, thank you.’ ” He struck an attitude. “ ‘Ashworth, sing A flat. Ashworth, sing A double flat. Write down this two-part tune, Ashworth, which I shall play only three times. Who, Ashworth, are the major composers of Tudor church music? And, Ashworth, what is
sforzando
—’ ”

“Mr. Beckford doesn’t talk like that.”

“He did ask me those things—”

“What happened to my Chopin?”

Henry brandished a thin book of music at her.

“Do you want to know what he said to me today?”

“Yes, actually.”

“Well,” Henry said, settling himself on the piano stool, “I was chasing Wooldridge in the cloisters and out came Mr. Sims who is only chapter steward but thinks he is more important than the bishop and he said we were hooligans and Mr. Beckford came and
said yes we were hooligans which was a pity for a man of
gravitas
like me who was going to be a full chorister. And Mr. Sims said he don’t deserve it sir and Mr. Beckford made us say sorry and then he said I’ve got to be measured for a surplice.”

There had been a young man with Mr. Beckford, a young man who had said “You don’t know your luck” when he heard about the surplice, but Henry did know his luck. Henry knew about his voice and about music, if only because he saw the contrast in Chilworth, who wanted to play soccer on Saturday afternoon, not rehearse, and who said he might leave the choir anyway, after a year, because he thought the Lenten music was too mournful. He swung round on the piano stool and opened the book of preludes and Sally leaned her elbows on the table and regarded his grey wool back with love and pride.

He played well, a little fast, but that was a sign that he was tired. They both got tired in term time, up for daily rehearsals, in and out of the cathedral all week for extra practices, Saturday afternoons without fail, seven sung services a week, school, homework. At least being so involved with Henry helped to fill the gap Alan left, not so much by his physical absence as by his deliberate separateness from her, his pursuit of his own unhusbandly, unfatherly life. Yet he loved Henry—in a way. Sally had heard the bishop say once, from the cathedral pulpit, that there are so many, many ways of loving. But what were you to do when your way and your partner’s way turned out to be so different that neither could see the other even meant love by it? She shoved Alan’s letter under the plate that had held Henry’s tea-time sandwich and wished fiercely for a husband who would be her
friend
.

Henry stopped playing and turned round, grimacing on a yawn.

“Bath and bed,” Sally said.

Henry’s eyes strayed with ill-disguised desire towards the television.

“No,” Sally said.

“Just
EastEnders
—”

“Particularly not
EastEnders
.”

“
Please
—”

“No.”

“I couldn’t sleep, it’s far too early.”

“Bed is for rest as well as sleep.”

“Television is
very
restful—”

“Henry …,” warningly.

“Do you
know
,” he said, suddenly brightening, “that if you stretched your lungs out absolutely flat, they’d cover a tennis court?”

“How revolting.”

“I knew you’d say that. Chilworth said his mum’d say how interesting because she refuses to be shocked.”

“That must be very disappointing for him.”

“She’s a teacher,” Henry said.

“Oh?”

“She wanted to go on strike with the others at Horsley Comp but Grandpa talked them out of it.”

Grandpa! They looked at each other.

“You must tell him,” Sally said, “about being a chorister. Go on, Henry, telephone, quick, quick.”

Frank Ashworth lived in the top flat of a block built on the site of a Victorian terrace known as Back Street, where he had been born. Front Street had become the main waterfront for the part of the docks whose face it was his aim to lift, and Back Street ran parallel behind it. The entrance to the block was precisely over the patch of yard where Frank’s father had grown leeks, huge, woody, prize-winning monsters banked up in the black earth to produce their massive unearthly whiteness. Frank had lived away from the docks for only three years when Alan’s mother, seizing upon his rising public profile, had insisted that they move out to Horsley, the up- and-coming Aldminster suburb whose vanishing meadows had once been the grazing grounds for Saxon horses. Frank had hated Horsley. He had disliked its isolation from the city and despised its frail gentility. After three years, Alan’s mother had allied herself to a garage owner and been taken away in a Jaguar to a house in Edgbaston, and Frank had returned to the docks.

He started a transport business. It prospered, sturdily but undramatically.
It supported Frank and a workforce of fifteen, including drivers, and it paid for Alan to go to Malvern College, where he insisted, incomprehensibly to Frank, that he wished to go. His relationship with Alan was ever precarious, always in danger of drowning in Frank’s real sorrow that he seemed unable to pass on the depths of his own beliefs to his son. When Alan grew to be eighteen and used his first vote for the Conservatives, Frank felt real pain, not so much for the political choice but because he knew Alan had not really decided, had not thought properly about it, had just let his thin public school veneer prevail. His mother had given him a gold signet ring for that birthday.

“You’d be a fool to wear that,” Frank had said. “You’ll be spotted. Not by your voice, but by the fact you haven’t any bottom to you.”

Alan was slightly afraid of his father. The flat was full of books and Alan wasn’t used to books. What his mother called books Malvern College had called magazines, and what they had called books were seldom seen in the house in Edgbaston. But Frank read his books. He read Shakespeare and Marx and James Joyce and Gibbon, and the love that he might have put into family life, had he had any, he put into his city. The city council was at least Labour, and he, a third-generation socialist, was its most forceful and diligent councillor. He battled for parks and trees and pedestrian precincts and street lighting, for schools and the disabled and the elderly, for the use of the whole city by its people. His present scheme was to convert the old inner dock, on Front Street, made redundant by the demands of modern ships for more sophisticated anchorage, into a pleasant waterside place where barges specially equipped for wheelchairs could be moored, and a bandstand erected, not for the trumpet and horn brigade, but for folk groups and jazz quartets. When he had done that—and here, in his musings, he would cross his wide sitting room from its western view of the docks to its steep eastern view up the hill to the cathedral—he would open up the close, that unnatural, unjustifiable sanctuary, to the people of the city to whom it belonged.