The Choir Read online

  She bent over him, tucking the duvet closer. His hair needed washing. His hair always needed washing.

  “Night, night.”

  He grunted. He seemed suddenly very far away from her, separated not just by sleep but by his talent, by music, this thing she could admire and enjoy but could not share, Henry’s own thing. The digital alarm clock by his bed said that it was hardly ten o’clock. On an impulse, Sally went quickly downstairs and picked up the telephone.

  “Who?” said Leo Beckford.

  “Sally Ashworth. Henry’s mother. I’m sorry to ring so late—”

  “Is it late?”

  He looked about him vaguely as if the time and its consequences would somehow surface helpfully out of the chaos of the room. He had been writing an article on the qualities to be looked for in awarding organ scholarships, and as usual, his mind refused to change gear with ease.

  “I just wanted to ask you about Henry—”

  “Yes,” Leo said.

  “Is—is he really good? Or just a bit better than most?”

  Henry’s voice burst abruptly into Leo’s memory, singing the Agnus Dei. Leo’s mind cleared.

  “I should rather say, Mrs. Ashworth, that his voice was outstanding.”

  “That good?”

  “That good. It will, of course, ripen in the next two years.”

  He could not recall Henry’s mother. He was not conscious of mothers much, beyond their obligations to fetch and carry his choristers and his irritation with them if they failed to make that a priority. Sally Ashworth said, in a voice suddenly full of emotion, “You see, I do so want his life to have a chance of the first rate, and if his voice, even if it’s only for his boyhood, is so good, it will help him escape being mediocre, it will lift him, do you see—”

  Leo said gently, “Do you think this is the right moment, or the right medium for this sort of conversation?”

  There was a pause, and then Sally said humbly, “It was an impulse. To ring you. I was so thrilled to hear that Henry was to be a full chorister, but I felt so far away—”

  “You could,” Leo said with an effort, “come to a choir practice, if you like.”

  “I didn’t think you were keen on mothers’ doing that.”

  “To be honest, I’m not. But you seem to want to involve yourself in Henry’s music, and I am offering you a chance, if you think that is what is best for him.”

  “You don’t—”

  “The cathedral choristers are professionals, Mrs. Ashworth.”

  There was a silence, and then Sally said in a voice of resolute cheerfulness, “Do you know, Mr. Beckford, that I think I am making rather a fool of myself. I am so very pleased to hear your good opinion of Henry, and I am grateful to you for talking to me. Thank you so much. Good night.”

  She put the telephone down. At the other end, Leo stood and held the humming receiver. What was it she had really wanted, with her funny mixed manner, all at once forlorn and gallant? He put the telephone down. She had aroused in him the same puzzled sympathy as poor Nicholas Elliott, still doing odd jobs about the school, with everyone intermittently and fruitlessly wondering what to do with him next. Leo himself wondered if he ought to take Nicholas in. His gaze strayed over the room, the chairs and tables laden with books and papers, the wastepaper baskets overflowing, cases and bags and boxes lurching where he had left them, and the whole loosely knitted together with a trailing crochet of electrical cables from lamps and heaters and record players. Perhaps Nicholas could sort it out a bit. Leo imagined himself opening the door of the room to Nicholas and saying, “All that can be said for this mess is that it would be worse if I were still married.”

  And that, at least, was no more than the truth.

  3

  WHEN THE HEADMASTER OF HORSLEY COMPREHENSIVE—a man whose unquestionable commitment to education was gradually being soured by the unlovely cocktail of aggression and apathy in the school that he was forced to drink—wrote to the Cavendishes to ask for an interview with them about Cosmo, Bridget said at once that they should deal firmly with him. The dean assumed she referred to Cosmo.

  “Certainly not, Huffo. I mean Mr. Miller. Dealt with sensibly, as we do here, Cosmo is very little problem. He must learn to do the same.”

  The dean bowed his head over his toast and marmalade.

  “Cosmo,” he said in the measured tones of one hanging on to the last shreds of self-control, “is a nightmare of a problem exacerbated by your idiotic indulgence of him.”

  Bridget opened her next letter, gave the dean a humouring smile, and said, very kindly, “Nonsense.”

  When the dean had first met Bridget Mainwaring, she was still living at home. She was not only living in it, but running it, for Bishop Mainwaring was a widower. To step into the palace in his day, even in the early sixties, was to enter the world of Barchester, a Grantlyesque world of gentlemanly assumptions and comforts. The bishop’s handsome, capable daughter with her ready laugh and inexhaustible energy had seemed to Hugh Cavendish the mainspring of this civilized, beeswaxed, flower-filled household, a woman who instinctively understood both God and mammon. When he had wooed her and won her—no very arduous task, for she was thirty-two, very eager, yet very exacting as to the breeding and calling of her suitors—he discovered that she thought God was a part of mammon, a kind of high moral gloss available to put upon the good things of this world. He also discovered that she was not teachable, that she lacked not only any kind of self-awareness but, even more dangerously, the smallest atom of humility. Bringing with her a vanload of lovely furniture and rugs and pictures from the palace—“Daddy won’t be entertaining on anything like such a scale without me”—she swung into action to make the various houses of Hugh Cavendish’s career into the unmistakable dwellings of an aristocratic nineteenth-century clergyman of private means. She ran parishes in the same way, arousing waves of fury and admiration, and filled her nurseries with babies, whom, since they were, as her children, extensions of herself, she could not for the life of her see objectively. Hugh Cavendish ate well, slept and dressed in perfectly laundered linen, trod gleaming floors, and inhaled stephanotis and jasmine and potpourri, and watched the wife of his bosom envelop herself in a hide of complacency so thick that no human weapon had power to penetrate it. He sometimes wondered if she even saw Cosmo, quite literally; whether, when her eyes rested upon her youngest son—a triumph, born when she was forty-two—she saw not the reality of his macabre sooty hair and clothes but a fantasy of tweed jacket and corduroys and well-polished brogues. She said now, “I shall go and see Mr. Miller. Don’t you bother.”

  “I should like to see Mr. Miller.”

  “My dear. You haven’t a minute.”

  “I shall make a minute. I have every sympathy with Mr. Miller.”

  “Poor dear man. Such a very varied school—”

  “I have every sympathy for Mr. Miller over Cosmo.”

  “Huffo!”

  The dean rose.

  “It must be a wretched problem indeed to have Cosmo in one’s school.”

  “Huffo—”

  “Don’t call me Huffo. I shall take Benedict for a run.”

  Bridget smiled again.

  “Don’t worry about Mr. Miller. I’ll telephone the moment I’ve opened my letters.”

  “Please do not. I will telephone when I return from my walk.”

  He called the dog from the kitchen, collected lead and stick, and left the deanery by the front door. He had not even reached the gate to the close before he heard his wife’s voice on the telephone, asking with her unmistakable commanding friendliness, if she might speak at once to the headmaster.

  Humankind had failed the dean. He had meant to love his fellow man, had believed not only that he could, but that it would be easy because he wanted to, but he had found, to his dismay, that most of his fellow men simply were not lovable. Their deviousness he might have forgiven, their unscrupulousness and even cruelty—the world was after all a harsh place and d
rove a man to very basic behaviour merely to survive—but their oafish vulgarity, their unashamed preference for the crude and the shoddy, fell little short of disgusting him. Standing in the cathedral he would picture to himself the original medieval congregation, drawn from its holes and hovels, gazing in rapture and awe at the brilliance and beauty of this holy place; the souls of such people seemed to him very precious. Then he would walk out into the close and be confronted by tourists in trainers, a litter of hamburger boxes, and couples who never entered a church necking on the grass, and he would be filled with rage at their evident intention not to strive towards beauty, indeed, their intention to turn their backs upon it.

  And if these were not enough for Hugh Cavendish to bear, these bitter disappointments in both his marriage and his mission, what of the added blow of his children? Brought up in a careful atmosphere of worthwhile objects and standards and sounds, well educated, good-looking, every one, and with above-average brains, they had formed themselves instinctively into an aggressive union that seemed bent upon overthrowing the dean’s traditional rule. Fergus, the eldest and cleverest, was a loudly proclaimed atheist, the assistant editor of a satirical magazine for which any tradition was automatically a target. He lived with a very beautiful actress who was coal black and had two small brown children by a former Indian lover. The next in line, Petra, sculpted vast metal beasts in a warehouse shared by a Welsh painter older than the dean, whose wife broke into the warehouse regularly and wrecked anything of Petra’s she had strength and time to destroy. It worried the dean to see how much Petra drank. She drank roughly, like a man, in a man’s quantities. Ianthe—the dean had a photograph of Ianthe in his dressing room, taken when she was four, dressed in a smock from Liberty’s and laughing at him out of an apple tree—Ianthe had been left five thousand pounds by a godmother, and had invested it, with three friends, in a record company. The company was called Ikon.

  “Do you know what an ikon is?” the dean had demanded of Ianthe.

  “Of course. It’s an image. That’s the point.”

  “But it is a sacred image!”

  Ianthe shrugged.

  “Oh, that again,” she said.

  At least Ianthe had no bizarre lover, if you did not count a frail young man called Adam who followed her about lighting her cigarettes and laughing tremendously at almost anything she said. She was horrible to him, but he still followed her. She was horrible to him because she was in love with Leo Beckford, and Leo made it plain, had always made it plain, that he thought she was a childish pest. She was the only one of the dean’s children who worked hard, and she worked slavishly because she meant to make a success of Ikon and prove to Leo that she was really a wonderful modern woman.

  And then there was Cosmo. Cosmo who smiled at people and was never put out, and whose whole heart and soul were bent upon overturning whatever seemed ordered or harmonious or constructive. He was the most demonstrative of their children, beloved by every parishioner since babyhood, and seemed to the dean to be not so much his own son but rather a character created by John Wyndham. Cosmo, the dean felt, was deeply dangerous, and Mr. Miller, battling to hold his craft steady in a hurricane, should be given every help. Indeed, at this moment, whistling Benedict back from his insatiable Labrador’s interest in a litter bin, the dean felt his loyalty lay more with Mr. Miller than with either his wife or his son. He would telephone Mr. Miller and see him alone, if necessary without Bridget’s knowledge.

  He turned for home and his eye swung with relief and joy across the west end of the cathedral. There lay the answer, there lay all that was good and right and beautiful. To that edifice the dean would give all he had to give; there was no doubt now in his mind, after all these years of disillusionment, that that great building was most literally the house of God, the only place where He could possibly live.

  Frank Ashworth dressed with particular care to go to the deanery. He did so not out of respect but out of expediency; his friendly old cardigans would not carry as much weight in the dean’s study as the subdued suit Sally had helped him buy in the closing-down sale of the old gents’ outfitters where, he remembered, his father had bought a black hat for his mother’s funeral. Frank was allergic to anything sartorially remarkable and had only been persuaded into the suit because it was in his bulky size and cost only sixty pounds, and because Sally said it was the dullest suit she had ever seen.

  When the dean opened his door, wearing a grey cardigan with his dog collar—Frank was not to know it was cashmere—the prospects for the interview seemed to Frank to promise well.

  “Mr. Ashworth.”

  “Good of you to see me, Mr. Cavendish—”

  “Not at all, only too pleased. Here, do sit down—”

  There was a bowl of roses on the dean’s desk, and a welcoming dog on the hearth rug, and a sherry decanter and glasses glittering on a tray in the sunlight.

  “Sherry?”

  “Not for me, thanks. Doesn’t seem to agree with me.”

  “Gin? Gin and tonic?”

  “The tonic,” Frank said slowly, “will do me very well.”

  A cut-glass tumbler was put beside him, heaving with ice and lemon and bubbles.

  “Your very good health—”

  “I’ve come with a proposition, Mr. Cavendish.”

  Hugh looked reflectively at the ceiling.

  “I imagined you might have such a purpose in mind.”

  “The people of this city don’t have sufficient use of the close.”

  Hugh’s gaze left the plaster rose on the ceiling and fell swiftly on Frank Ashworth.

  “That is their choice, Mr. Ashworth. The close is open to everyone, as is the cathedral. They choose, of their own free will, other parts of the city.”

  Frank said calmly, “Because they know they are not welcome.”

  “Not welcome! Absurd.”

  Frank took an unhurried swallow of his tonic water.

  “They feel that the close is not for them. It’s too grand. They’ve nowhere to go in the close that’s their own.”

  “It is all their own,” the Dean said with an effort.

  “I repeat. They are not made welcome. They feel out of place.”

  The dean got up and walked to the window. From the hearth rug, sensing an atmosphere, Benedict watched anxiously. The dean came back.

  “Perhaps, Mr. Ashworth, we mean different things by welcome. The cathedral is a sacred building in which reverence for God and His worshippers is made manifest by silence and unobtrusive movements. Those who do not profess the Christian faith are most welcome in the cathedral, but on account of the reasons I have just given, they are not welcome to run or shout or play games or loud secular music. The same respectful behaviour—respectful of other humans as much as the Almighty—is somewhat naturally expected in the close, which, owing to its proximity to the cathedral, is not quite like any other public park.”

  “Quite so.”

  The dean waited.

  “I’m not suggesting the close should become like the Lyng Gardens. I’m only suggesting that it shouldn’t frighten people off.” The phrase “stuck up” presented itself to Frank, but he was a professional at unemotional argument, so he dismissed it.

  “I’ve a proposal.”

  “Ah,” said the dean.

  “The headmaster’s house of the King’s School is, I believe, the property of the dean and chapter. It’s a big house, Mr. Cavendish, some fourteen or fifteen rooms? It is at present occupied only by Mr. and Mrs. Troy, who have no children at home and use perhaps six rooms. I would like to propose to the council that we make the dean and chapter an offer for that house, and turn it into a meeting place for the city, a crèche, a coffee shop, a magazine and newspaper library, even an art gallery for local artists—”

  The dean fought down the kind of rising panic induced in him by conversations with his wife.

  “This—this seems all most novel. Would—would it be some kind of club?”

  “I shou
ldn’t like to see that. I want to see the close made unselective—”

  “I must consult others, you know, but I hardly feel very sanguine, Mr. Ashworth. The house is probably the best we have in the close, and the headmaster must be fittingly housed, you know, he has obligations—”

  Frank stood up.

  “Would you put it to the next chapter meeting?”

  “Well, yes—well, I suppose I must since you request it, but really the proposal does not seem to me in the least suitable, or indeed necessary—”

  “If you lived in the city proper, you would see that it was necessary.”

  The dean came to stand close to Frank and peer into his face.

  “What about the almshouses? The records could surely be stored elsewhere, and the council already owns half that building—”

  “It would be nothing like as suitable. It has no garden. I’m not a man for second bests.”

  The dean withdrew a pace.

  “I assume,” he said coldly, “that your proposal is made with open and honourable intention? You are not, are you, threatening any kind of compulsory purchase order? Because I must tell you that our statutes protect us there, the statutes granted by Henry the Eighth—”

  Frank moved towards the door. When he reached it, he paused and looked back at the dean.

  “I wouldn’t threaten, Mr. Cavendish. I wouldn’t need to. All I’m doing is suggesting that we might do each other a bit of good.”

  “A bit of good?”

  “I would think that house is worth a tidy bit and you are always short of money in the close.”

  “I think that is no concern of the council, Mr. Ashworth.”

  Frank shrugged.

  “Well,” he said with the appearance of unconcern that his opponents on the council had come to dread, “it’s only an idea. Give it some thought—but it’s only an idea.”