The Choir Read online

  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.

  Halfway up that hill, in a friendly Georgian terrace that had seen better days, Alan and his wife, Sally, had bought a house. Alan had not wanted to live in the city, he had found a pair of cottages he wanted to convert in a village ten miles outside, but Sally wanted a job and, in any case, had had enough of the country in her girlhood, confined to a small village with her mother. In the end Alan’s being abroad so much had decided it, and they had bought the battered house in Blakeney Street. Sally went to work for an antiquarian book dealer who also ran a small wholesale wine business from his basement. A strong mutual respect existed between Frank and his daughter-in-law; he was careful not to step in to supply the lacks caused by Alan’s absences, but he could not but be pleased when he was appealed to. He felt that it was at least in part to Sally that he owed the dignity and affection of his relationship with his grandson.

  “What’ll they pay you for all this honour?” he said to Henry now, over the telephone.

  “Sixpence an evensong—”

  Frank grunted. After a pause, he said, “That’s about sixty pounds over five years. How many hours a week?”

  “Seven public services and about eighteen hours’ practice. Same as now. Grandpa—”

  “Mm?”

  “I’ll have to have a ruff.”

  “You’ll look a right little ticket, won’t you?”

  “Mum says are you coming to see us.”

  “What, now? Is she looking tired?”

  “Wiped out,” Henry said cheerfully.

  “Tell her to go to bed with a stiff Scotch. I’ll see her another day.”

  “She says can she have a word. Half a sec—”

  Sally said clearly, “Won’t you come and have a Scotch with me, to celebrate?”

  “Have you eaten?”

  “I sort of picked at Henry’s tea—”

  “I’ve got a steak here. Shall I bring that?”

  “Yes,” she said, suddenly hungry.

  “I’ll not stay long.”

  “I’d like to see you …”

  There was a pause and then Frank said, “Clever little chap,” and rang off.

  His refrigerator was full of the solid, uncompromising food he had always preferred; it was full because he liked food. He took out the steak, a couple of big tomatoes, a piece of tasty cheddar, and a paper bag of huge ope
n mushrooms, which, though still travesties of proper field mushrooms, were a marked improvement on the anaemic little white buttons that abounded in supermarkets. He found five pound coins as a tip for Henry on this particular day, and carried the whole lot down to the eight-year-old grey Rover that was one of the best-known cars in the city and was regarded indulgently by most traffic wardens.

  Sally had laid the table in the big all-purpose ground-floor room in Blakeney Street, and had pinned up her heavy hair rather loosely and changed her pink sweatshirt for a black one. She didn’t kiss Frank; they never had. Henry, on the other hand, hopping around in tracksuit pyjamas, put his arms round his grandfather’s neck and kissed him with warmth.

  “Hold out your hand.”

  Frank put the pound coins in a ring on Henry’s palm.

  “Whoopee,” Henry said.

  From the stove, Sally said, “And thank you, perhaps?”

  “Thank you very much.”

  “Where’s this voice come from,” Frank said, “that’s what I’d like to know.”

  “That’s what I like about it,” Sally said, unwrapping the steak, “not knowing, just having it.”

  “Don’t you put garlic on that.”

  “Mr. Godwin stinks of garlic,” Henry said, “all the time. We can’t breathe in Latin. Will you come to my service?”

  “Try and keep me away.”

  Henry looked awkward. His grandfather did not believe in God.

  “You won’t mind?”

  “Mind?”

  “Being in the cathedral?”

  “Why should I mind? I’ve often been in it. It’s my cathedral. It’s a beautiful place.”

  “Mr. Beckford says it isn’t in the first division of English cathedrals, but it jolly well ought to be near the top of the second.”

  “Bed,” Sally said, above the frying.

  Henry squirmed on the arm of Frank’s chair.

  “Shall I play you something?”

  “Something quick, you monkey, then bed.”

  Henry rushed to the piano.

  “I’ll play you the Gloria, syncopated, then it sounds like Chinese music, listen—”

  When he stopped, he shouted, “Ying tong yiddle I po!”

  “How old are you?” Frank demanded.

  “Nearly eleven.”

  “You’re a twit. Anyone ever told you?”

  “Only you.”

  “Henry,” Sally said, warningly, “cheek.”

  Henry stooped and kissed his grandfather.

  “Night—”

  “Night, old fellow.”

  “Mum, Mum, night—”

  “I’ll come and tuck you in. Don’t forget your teeth.”

  The door banged behind him. “Ying-tong-ying-tong-ying-tong,” sang Henry on the stairs and then, without a pause, the first line, clear and strong, of the “Magnificat.”

  “Is he really good?” Frank said.

  “I don’t know. I’m not musical enough to know. But he has only been a probationer for six months. The whole thing has been so sudden, even realizing he could sing at all—”

  She carried two plates of steak across to the table and put them down opposite each other.

  “This is a treat. Henry and I eat sausages and eggs mostly. As for a joint—there’s no point for two.”

  There was an airmail letter propped between the salt and pepper mills.

  “Any news from Alan?”

  “Yes,” Sally said. “Read that if you want to.”

  “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “I probably shouldn’t say this to you but I can’t help feeling that the arrangement Alan and I have is not what marriage is for.”

  Frank looked at her. She was a good-looking girl and she didn’t lack courage. His heart smote him for her but all he said was, “It wouldn’t be like you to give up.”

  She motioned him to sit down and pushed the dish of mushrooms towards him.

  “I didn’t say anything about giving up. All I said was that I think marriage is not about living as we do, quite separately. Well, not for me, anyway.”

  Frank took a bite.

  “Would you like him to come home?”

  There was a pause and then Sally said, “Not particularly.”

  “Is there something you would like me to do?”

  “Thank you,” she said, and smiled at him, “thank you, but you can’t. I just thought you ought to know my state of mind. That’s all. Come on now, what’s the gossip from the city?”

  When he left Blakeney Street, Frank took the Rover up the Lyng to the close and parked it behind the sixteenth-century almshouses, which now held the county archives in one half and a firm of solicitors in the other. There was no moon, but the sky was light still behind the black bulk of the cathedral. Frank looked at it with affection. He was rather afraid that in old age the idea of a god was going to become more natural to him and that even now, the fact that the cathedral was a spiritual building set it apart, gave it a significance and a stature that it would not have had if it were a castle or a moated manor crowning the close’s green dome. But then, that very stature alarmed some of the people of Aldminster; he doubted that more than a few hundred citizens regularly used the cathedral and he felt a huge moral indignation, as well as a great sadness, that they should be daunted by something that had been put up by men like them for men like them.

  The close was very quiet. It was much quieter than the Lyng at ten o’clock at night, much quieter than the docks or the newly cobbled precinct where he had fought alongside the junior chamber of commerce to bring in wine bars and eating places, to keep life there, after the shops shut. And here was the close, this great green lung offered up to the heavens high in the heart of the city, empty of people, absolutely empty, no sign of life beyond a few quiet lights shining from windows or from the wrought-iron arches over gateways. Beautiful, yes, in its quirky, unplanned way, harmonious, severe, but dead, dead. No drunks, even, nor drug addicts gasping away in furtive corners, as they did in the graveyards of the city’s churches at night, propped against tombs, half dead themselves, some of them. Ivies grew in those churchyards, and yew, and both made rank black holes to hide in, but the smooth sweep of the close afforded no shelter; try to hide there and the empty grass would of itself offer you up to whatever was watching you from up there behind the stars. The old hobos would tuck themselves in corners of the buttresses sometimes, but then they, in their wandering freedom, had nothing to hide, no score to settle by self-destruction. There was one up there now. Frank could see him, a black bundle in the angle made by the south porch against the walls. He’d go up to him in a minute and give him a quid or two and chat a bit. The last one he’d talked to had remarked that though it was a fine cathedral, it couldn’t, to his way of thinking, hold a candle to Wells. He had smelled like an old wet dog with rotten teeth.

  Frank had been glad to see him. He was glad now to see the glow of another tramp’s cigarette and to observe, silhouetted against the dim light of the far end of the close, the black outline of what was undoubtedly the dean taking his dog for a late-night run. Frank shook his head. Nice enough fellow, the dean, but as far removed from the world of ordinary men as if he were not one himself. All that breathed for him was those stones up there, block upon block, while all Frank could see was the hands that had put them there, every one in its place. He turned away and made for the headmaster’s house, instinctively drawn, as so many people were, by its particular charm, as well as its quality. Two lights were on, a faint one on the first floor, a stronger one in the two long windows beside the front door. The curtains had not been pulled. Frank could see in quite clearly, could see Alexander Troy in an armchair, with a clipboard and papers on his knee and a bottle of whisky beside him, and through the glass he could hear most strong and distinctive choral music, which Henry would have told him was Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. Troy looked extremely solitary, and at first Frank’s sympathy was aroused, and then he raised his eyes and looked along
the lovely length of the darkened house, unused and empty. “Bloody waste,” Frank said to himself. He clenched his fists in his trouser pockets and glared at the unconscious Alexander. “Bloody waste.”

  When Frank had gone, Sally Ashworth cleared up a bit and turned on the television and turned it off again and made a shopping list for the next day and fed the cat and put the sheets in the washing machine, ready to turn on in the morning, and then went upstairs to look at Henry. He lay like everyone’s idea of a child asleep, humped in a prawn shape under his duvet with only a crest of hair visible, giving off an aura of being most thoroughly asleep. Beside him, on the floor, lay the grey woollen trail of his school clothes, a comic book about Asterix, and a crumpled photocopy of Masefield’s “Cargoes” with “Learn by heart for Tuesday’s prep” written across it in Henry’s still-babyish hand. Above his bed he had pinned a large photograph of the choir on an outing to Worcester, and had drawn a large red arrow from himself to the white margin, where he had written “Henry Francis Ashworth aged 10.” There was also a photograph of his parents, posing self-consciously for him in the front doorway, and dozens of the cat, who was called Mozart and had a distinct sense of humour.

  Sally had done the room up during a phase of trying to throw herself into interior decor. It didn’t last long, because real life reasserted itself and the vast bouquet of dried flowers in a willow basket she had carefully put as a focal point in the hall proved to be directly in Henry’s flight path from front door to kitchen, as well as to contain, Mozart insisted, untold menaces within its rustling depths. She had stripped and waxed all the wood in Henry’s room, covered the walls with paper striped like mattress ticking, laid rush mats on the floor, bought a bean bag and a cork pinboard and an anglepoise lamp. Three years later, Henry had strewn his pervasive but impersonal masculine detritus across the room, all but obliterating its careful, liberal good looks. Tonight, she noticed that he had clearly been helping the rush mat to unravel, for a long pale snake of it was uncoiling from the central mass and making for the door. The anglepoise was bent, the pinboard was empty except for thumbtacks arranged to say “A Team,” and Henry had said a few days before that he would very much like it if his walls could be brown. Dark brown.