The Choir (31 page)

“Sal?”

She stepped back into the house and he followed her and leaned forward for a kiss.

“No,” she said.

“I should have brought you some flowers—”

She gave a little snort, and walked into the big room.

“Come on, Sal,” he said, “there’s no need for such a big deal now. I’m home.”

He dumped his bag on the floor and began to tramp about the room, admiring things, commenting on changes. Sally stood by the stove, fiddling with coffee things, ignoring him until she held a mug out towards him and said, “Alan, it’s
over
.”

He took the mug and said in a voice whose airy tone implied that she hadn’t uttered, “Where’s our Henry, then?”

“He’s with a friend. He’ll be back later. We have to talk before we tell him.”

Alan came up to her suddenly and held a threatening forefinger close to her face.

“Tell him what? Tell him I’m going to live at home now and he’ll have a father around from now on, if you like. At least that’s
true. Tell him that while I’ve been slaving out there for you and him, you’ve been amusing yourself with another man. That’s true, too. We’ll tell him both those things together.”

Sally held on to the stove rail and bowed her head and begged fiercely for self-control. Leo had taken her into the cathedral early that morning—“Not for anything godly,” he said, “but just to remind you of the eternal stuff of things, the great enduring human qualities that get people through crises like this. You’ll be all right the other side and so will Henry. If I have anything to do with it, you’ll both be better, not just all right.” He had walked her up and down the great aisles and round the shadowy curve of the ambulatory, and when they parted, he took her by the shoulders and said, “Now, don’t get angry. Don’t put yourself in his power.”

She raised her head now and looked at Alan.

“No changes in your life will affect my decision. It’s over. I don’t want to be married to you anymore.”

He shouted, “OK, OK, just chuck it all at me before I’ve even had time to wash, before I’ve even been in the house five minutes—”

He sank into a chair and put his free hand over his eyes.

“It’ll be different, Sal, I promise. I’ll do whatever you want.”

“I only want a divorce.”

“But you’ve given me no warning, you’ve just taken and taken all I’ve given you and suddenly out of the blue you turn around and say you’re bored with me and you want a change—”

“That whole speech,” she said, interrupting, “is a lie.”

His voice sank to a whisper.

“You can’t do this to me—”

She said nothing.

“You can’t do this to Henry!”

She walked rapidly past him to the pine table and picked up a tabloid paper.

“It’s all in here.”

“What, what is—”

“Henry is something of a nine days’ wonder because of the record he has made and the close has been in an uproar because the dean has tried to get rid of the choir. And somebody has now gone to
the press and told them that Leo and I are having an affair, and the whole story is here, richly embellished with adjectives. Henry hasn’t seen this, and I’ve asked Susan Hooper to be sure he doesn’t while he’s with her today, but we have to tell him ourselves, first.”

Alan snatched the paper. It was half an inside page, with a photograph of Henry, singing in the cathedral, and a headline that ran,
THE BITTER EXPERIENCE BEHIND THE INNOCENCE
.

“We haven’t got time to argue each other’s rights and wrongs,”

Sally said, “because there’s Henry.”

“I won’t have anything to do with it. I’m not leaving. I’m not giving you a divorce. I’ve nothing to tell Henry except I’m home and I’m staying.”

“Then I’ll tell him without you. I only waited for you, to be fair.”

He gave a yelp.

“Fair! After what you’ve done behind my back!
Fair
!”

“You disgust me,” Sally said.

She went out of the room and upstairs to her bedroom. She had made a bed up for Alan in the spare room and knew that that would be yet another hurdle to be got over, later. There was no sound from downstairs. She brushed her hair and then went into the bathroom and washed her hands and brushed her teeth. Mozart, who had been asleep on Henry’s bed, came in and made a few enquiring remarks and twined himself round her legs. She picked him up and he covered the front of her T-shirt in an instant with speckled hairs.

“We must get through this,” she said, “somehow.”

He purred. She put him down and he walked quietly back to his dent in Henry’s duvet. Sally brushed at her front to remove his hairs, took a deep breath, and walked downstairs. Alan was sitting where she had left him, the paper slithering off his knees, staring out of the window. He looked to her a complete and utter stranger.

“Look,” she said, in as friendly and steady a voice as she could manage, “we have got to talk this through. Haven’t we?”

Henry had a good day with Hooper. They gave the puppies obedience lessons—not particularly successful, since their pupils only had a
concentration span of a few minutes at a time—and Mrs. Hooper let them make shortbread and chocolate fudge, and two of her friends who came in during the day told Henry they had bought his record and that they thought it was wonderful. They had chicken drumsticks for lunch and in the afternoon they made a rope ladder out of two old washing lines and some chair legs they found at the back of the garage, and tied this to the copper beech Hooper was lucky enough to have in his garden, even though it was a town one. Mrs. Hooper gave them tea in a carrier bag to take up their ladder and eat in the darkness of the tree. The puppies danced round the bottom of the tree and yapped and so they chucked bits of biscuit and crust down to them. When Mrs. Hooper said it was time to take Henry home, he rather hoped Hooper would beg her to let him stay the night, as he often did, but this time he didn’t, and Henry didn’t feel he could ask. He said thank you enormously effusively, to see if that would prompt her, but although she was very nice to him, and had been really kind to him all day, she didn’t seem to get the message. At the back of his mind lurked his apprehensive knowledge that his father would be home, and he rather wanted to postpone seeing him. It was all right for people like Hooper and Chilworth, who saw their fathers all the time, but he just felt a bit jumpy. His father seemed to be coming home in a rush, and Grandpa had something to do with it, and all in all, Henry would have given a great deal to be curling up in a sleeping bag on the floor of Hooper’s bedroom and playing the signalling game with torches that they had got down to a fine art.

When Mrs. Hooper dropped him at Blakeney Street, his father came out to meet him; it was a great help that she was there to prevent there being any big deal of any kind. “No heavy scene,” Henry said to himself in the phrase he had learned from Wooldridge; Wooldridge used it all the time just now. He and Alan went up the steps together into the house and Alan asked him about his record and said what was it like to be famous. Henry blushed.

“Just the same—”

The table was laid for supper, and there was a big bowl of salad in the middle of it, and Sally was feeding Mozart, who was crying
loudly, as he always did when he caught sight of the tin opener. Henry rather wanted to pick him up, but that wouldn’t have been fair when he was so longing for his supper. Both his parents seemed rather jerky and peculiar, so he told them about the rope ladder and the puppies and Sally got a baked ham and potatoes out of the stove and they all sat down at the table. It looked perfectly ordinary but somehow it wasn’t
being
ordinary. Neither his mother nor his father wanted to eat much, and he was so full of tea he wasn’t very hungry either. His father kept asking him questions about the choir and the record and teasing him about being famous and when he said could he get down and go up to bed, they both said no, not just yet, they wanted to talk to him.

He thought he was going to have a lecture about not getting big-headed about the record, but instead they said a great deal about their not staying married anymore and Mum marrying Mr. Beckford, and how he wasn’t to worry, because nothing would change for him. His father was crying. Henry said, “Will we still live here?”

His mother said probably not, and then he felt very much that he was going to cry too, and then he did, and then he didn’t want to stay downstairs with them anymore, but rushed out of the room and upstairs and banged his bedroom door. He pulled his duvet off his bed and wound himself into it, like a padded caterpillar, and lay down on his bed, drawing up his feet and pulling down his head until he was quite obliterated in the soft bedfuggy darkness. He couldn’t stop crying; he thought he could probably cry for ever. When Sally came up to him he screamed, “Go away, go away, go away” at her out of his cocoon and went on crying. It was hot and horrible inside his duvet but he wasn’t coming out for anyone; his eyes felt like burning footballs. His parents stood outside his door, on the landing, and listened to him, muttering and sobbing, and when at last he stopped, his mother came in and unrolled him and peeled off his clothes and put on his pyjamas, and he came out of his abrupt angry, anguished sleep to shout at her, “I’m never going to get married!”

When she came out and went downstairs, Alan managed not to
be accusing out loud, but his eyes were full of it. He said he was going to sleep at his father’s and he took his bag and the car keys and went off. When he had gone, Sally picked up the telephone and dialled Leo’s number and at the sound of his voice, she began to cry, like Henry had, as if she could never stop.

C
OSMO
C
AVENDISH TOLD HIS FATHER THAT
I
ANTHE HAD BEEN
paid four hundred pounds for telling the newspaper about Leo Beckford and Sally Ashworth. He then added that of course she hadn’t done it for the money. The dean asked in a remarkably alarming voice what were her motives, then, and Cosmo said he didn’t know but he expected she had some.

“It is difficult to know,” the dean said then, “whether yours or Ianthe’s behaviour is the more unpleasant.”

Cosmo was dismayed to find he felt a little abashed by this. Rule-breaking was one thing, and a frequently glorious and reputation-enhancing one at that, but suggestions of being an unattractive character were quite another, and disconcerting. His life depended upon his pulling power over other people, his glamour upon rebellion, and he knew well that true distastefulness of personality had no glamour at all. He went away to seek consolation from his mother, who, to his astonishment, declared his father to be entirely right, and so, comforting himself with the knowledge that she wasn’t at all well at the moment—you could tell that, just by looking at her—he went upstairs to his black eyrie to things through. He had misjudged the situation badly and must discover why. After ten minutes he was rather inclined to blame Ianthe for everything, which was fine except that such a conclusion failed to remove the troubling knowledge that he had let himself down somehow, been
outsmarted. He went down for supper, after being called three times, to find only two places laid. Bridget said the dean had gone up to London and would not be back until midnight.

Ianthe was just going out when her father arrived. His appearance, in a dog collar, in her sitting room—the room, her brother Fergus said, of a vulgar theatrical landlady—which contained four friends, all bound for the same concert in Highgate, was extremely startling. Two of the men got instinctively to their feet and had a hard time later explaining this away. The dean, with immense courtesy and authority, emptied the room in ten minutes and then, without a single preliminary, said to his daughter, “And have you any explanation to offer for your disgusting behaviour?”

Ianthe was torn between tears and temper. She knew that most fathers in the nineteen-eighties didn’t speak to their grown-up daughters in this anachronistic and peremptory way—indeed the Sunday colour supplements paraded frequent interviews with modern fathers apparently craving the approval and affection of their careless daughters—but for all that, she was not sufficiently certain of her ground to fight back. Tears would be an instant admission of guilt. She lit a cigarette and began to walk nonchalantly about the room.

“Sit down,” her father said.

Compromising, she hitched one thigh on to the arm of a chair.

“It is rare in women, I believe,” the dean said, “for reasonable intelligence, which you are fortunate enough to possess, to be allied to glaring emotional immaturity. It would seem to me that you are a member of that unfortunate exceptional group, your case being exacerbated by an unattractive exhibitionism. You are not alone among your brothers and sister in having devoted yourself to defying and ridiculing all the principles by which you were brought up and by which you know I live, but you have carried your campaign to the furthest lengths of damaging folly. While your insults were confined to your home and family they could, with pain and difficulty, be borne. When you involve the reputation of a cathedral close and its inmates your behaviour is to be endured no longer. Are you listening to me?”

Ianthe said, “Can’t I speak?”

“By all means—”

She wished suddenly for her mother. She said, too emotionally, “You wouldn’t understand about love, you wouldn’t know what I’ve been through—”

“I know about love,” the dean said with distaste. “I am fortunate enough not to know about infatuation. Leo Beckford never gave you, to my knowledge, the smallest encouragement and your feelings were the result of your own deliberate exaggeration and persistence. The more he rebuffed you, the more you clung. In a stupid girl, I should regard such behaviour with pity. In a clever one, I view it only with contempt.”

“And you call yourself a priest!” she shouted.

“It is not, Ianthe, a priest’s function to be a bottomless well of woolly uncritical forgiveness. That would only devalue virtue.”

There was a pause. Ianthe went over to the window and leaned her forehead on the glass and looked down into the early evening street. She was very frightened and full of a self-disgust she was desperate to find a culprit for. The carapace of illusory independence she had shielded herself with since she inherited her five thousand pounds on her eighteenth birthday—refusing, simultaneously, the university place she had been offered—felt very thin and fragile. When the dean said, in a voice quite empty of warmth, “If you have made fools of us all, you have made a worse one of yourself,” she tried to speak and could say nothing.