The Choir (10 page)

“I’m not comfortable about that either,” Frank said. “It’s my son’s notion he should be at the King’s School, not mine.”

“I believe boys from the city schools have as much chance of becoming members of the choir as boys at the King’s School. In
fact I believe there are at least half a dozen bursaries and scholarships open to any boy from any school. And am I not right in saying that the chief education officer of the city is a governor of the King’s School?”

Frank got slowly to his feet.

“It’s the same problem, isn’t it? The same problem as with the close. People feel they aren’t welcome.”

The bishop walked across to the door and laid his hand on the handle.

“In my experience, Mr. Ashworth, people believe themselves to be welcome almost anywhere unless they are deliberately instructed that they are not. It is part of the Church’s teaching to extend the warmest welcome to all comers, and that welcome awaits everyone living in this city, both in the cathedral and in the heart of every member of the close, every day.” He opened the door. “I will see you out, Mr. Ashworth.”

When Frank had gone, the bishop sought the comfort of the kitchen.

“So right in his heart! So right! But so devious in his head. Not having God with you is like trying to walk normally on one leg; it twists you, it must. He sees everything in terms of class—”

“Did you tell him,” Janet Young said, laying strips of pastry across an apple tart, “that you went to a grammar school?”

“No,” the bishop said, “it didn’t come up. The council has a scheme to try to buy the headmaster’s house for some kind of social centre.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. It’s probably right. But the motives and methods are not right. Is that for lunch?”

“Sorry. It’s for the weekend. When Matthew is home.”

The bishop sat on a corner of the kitchen table.

“He’s a good man. He has given his life to this city, but he believes that only he knows what people want.”

“Do people know what they want themselves?”

The bishop leaned sideways and kissed his wife.

“I rather want lunch. And my specs have disintegrated again.”

“You shouldn’t eat them. Why don’t we get you a second pair? I did feel rather ashamed of that photograph of you in the
Echo
in your mitre and a large lump of Sellotape holding your glasses together.”

“Bishops don’t need to be
soigné
.”

“Ones that sit on floury kitchen tables certainly won’t be.”

“Janet …”

“Yes.”

“I wish people today weren’t so
unhappy
.”

She put the tart in the oven, and came back to him, and laid her warm cooking-scented hand on his.

“At least you’re in the right job to help
do
something about that.”

Using a Choir Schools Association meeting as a pretext, Alexander Troy went up to London to look for his wife. He noticed, as he usually did, that his entering a train with a dog collar on made fellow passengers suddenly alert—few of them sitting next to him could quite relax. Further up the carriage, two American nuns in school sandals, Crimplene frocks, and abbreviated modern veils, talking travel, were creating the same wary suppressed interest around them. Alexander looked at the young woman reading a printout and the man in a bomber jacket softly tapping a rolled-up copy of the
Sun
against the window who shared his quartet of seats, and wondered what they would do if he told them why he was going to London. He would appal them, of course. Instead, he did what they would expect him to do, and extracted from his briefcase a copy of
The Times
and a draft of his end-of-term speech. He looked up once and the young printout woman was looking at him with keen interest, an expression that changed to indignation when he smiled at her.

He got out at Paddington and went to pay the little silent tribute to Brunel’s statue that he always liked to do (if he had time he went also to salute Sergeant Jagger’s moving exhausted bronze soldier), and then he went down into the seething tunnels of the Underground and made his way with great complexity to Highgate and Felicity’s brother, Sam. Sam led a hybrid life as a freelance book-jacket
designer, cricket correspondent to a major Sunday paper, and part-time literature tutor at a crammer. He was unmarried and had the calm self-containment of one who is really interested in neither men nor women and lived in a house over which he took enormous trouble, whose floors he had painted beautifully and disconcertingly to resemble medieval maps, complete with dragons and sea beasts. Instinctively skirting a Welsh castle from whose keep a trumpeter blew a lonely blast, Alexander sat down in a director’s chair slung with black leather while Sam made coffee.

“She never came here,” Sam said. “I think I’d probably have told you if she was here. I
think
I would. But she did ring. She wasn’t very communicative but she said she’d be perfectly safe. She will too. And she’ll be back.”

“It’s nearly three weeks now.”

Sam put two pottery mugs of coffee down on his black table.

“How long was it last time?”

“Three weeks. Sam—”

“Why does she go?”

“Yes.”

Sam lit a cigarette.

“All the passion that’s missing in me, old son, got walloped into her. Emotional passion, I mean. You know that. She will take life so hard. It’s nothing you do. Or don’t do. It’s just Fliss. She was always buzzing off when we were kids, she sort of had to.” He gave Alexander a narrowed glance. “You miss her, don’t you?”

“Oh yes.”

“I’ve always reckoned,” Sam said, “that you’re pretty good to her. Living with anyone else has always scared me witless. Can’t take it. But you’re so patient.”

“I want to be. I don’t feel
im
patient.”

Sam stubbed out his cigarette.

“She gets in a state about God.”

“We all do.”

“But perhaps she feels she oughtn’t, married to you.”

“But I do myself. I think at least patches of spiritual turmoil are a hazard of the job.”

“Maybe.”

“Haven’t you any idea where she might be?”

“No. And if I did, you shouldn’t try to find her. She’ll come back of her own accord and it’ll mean a lot to her that you didn’t fuss her.” He looked at his watch. “Sorry, old son. I’ve got a tutorial in half an hour. Goon of a boy, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, God help us all three.”

Alexander stood up.

“It’s a comfort to see you. You make me feel her going is more ordinary than it sometimes feels in Aldminster.”

“Let’s face it,” Sam said, “for Fliss it is. Isn’t it?”

The comfort, however, did not last. Alexander sat through the meeting, rose to his feet only once to make an eloquent but not wholly relevant speech about the fragility of this unparalleled British tradition of choral singing in a hostile economic climate, and left for Paddington with a confused feeling that most of his emotional and mental lines were crossed. The train was packed and he had to stand for half the journey, being once, horrifyingly, offered a seat by a plain and trembling woman in a home-knitted jersey. Sam’s calm consolation leaked away as the westward miles were eaten up, and by the time the train slid wheezing into Aldminster, Alexander was as close to the blackest misery as he had ever been. The boys were coming out of compline as he reached the school, and he was quite shaken to find what a comfort they were in their unconscious ordinariness, bursting out of the chapel with exaggerated exhilaration after the queer and particular mood of the service. He hoped Leo might be there, but Leo was not. Leo was at that moment walking down Blakeney Street to have supper with Sally Ashworth, with a bottle of Valpolicella in his pocket.

Mrs. Miles had left Alexander a pork pie and a plastic pot of fierce mustardy coleslaw on a tray for his supper. He had a heap of work to do. He had to plan the choir tour almost a year in advance and he was late already—a polite letter from the Abbé at Saint-Benoît-sur-Saône lay reproachfully on his desk, and had so lain for a fortnight. Speech Day was fast approaching, and the thrice-annual agony of reports, that eternal wrangle between compassion, accuracy,
and originality, not to mention public examinations, and he could not even stop to
consider
that Felicity was he knew not where and that his house was about to become a coffee shop for the city. “Fifty-two,” he thought, regarding himself without affection in the small glass he kept in his study for robing. “Fifty-two. This should be the great decade of a man’s life, the
rich
decade. And I seem to have lost all interest in it. If I died now, what would I leave? What
would
I leave?” He crossed the room to his ancient record player and put on the Bach Choir singing Mathias’s “Lux Aeterna,” and then he went to his desk and sat down to his welter of papers. In the kitchen, Nicholas Elliott, who had come down from his lonely corner in the infirmary in search of food, found the pork pie and the coleslaw and ate both with enthusiasm.

The following afternoon, Alexander took his ancient history class across to the cathedral as an alternative to Pericles. They were very excited about this and hopped chattering round him saying Sir, Sir, Sir and not listening to his replies. Over the years, he had worked on being a good guide for small boys, and this day he took them round the half circle of past bishops in the ambulatory, from Osric, lying remote and still on his little granite tomb, to Langley Blake, who had denounced the moral laxity of the sixties in a most medieval manner, and had died in the late seventies saying “I told you so.” As usual, the boys liked best the graceful cartouche put up for the eighteenth-century bishop Joshua Fielding, on account of the horses’ and dogs’ heads emerging from the marble scrolls, representations of the bishop’s own beloved animals, which he had requested to be remembered with him. It was said that he had kept a tame hare in a basket in his study and had read his sermons aloud to the elderly sow who lived in a pen behind the palace. The humorous humanity of this never failed to strike a chord, and was an excellent prelude to taking the class into the choir stalls for a moment’s quiet prayer. This was a small thrill in itself, to be kneeling where the choristers knelt, for the school was proud of its singing boys, which accounted for their being so relentlessly teased. They shot covert glances now of admiration at Ashworth and Chilworth who knew their way
about these high dark pews with their interestingly carved tip-up seats and hard red plush hassocks. The seventeen boys knelt and briefly considered their hazy notions of prayer and God and their more concrete one of the pig, and then they got up with alacrity and were told not to fiddle with the psalters and the candlesticks, and were lined up in some sort of order to troop back to school for tea and, because this was Thursday, Swiss buns.

On the way out of the chancel, going past the western staircase, they met the dean, the cathedral architect, and another man coming down. All three looked gravely preoccupied. The cathedral architect was saying, “Of course, until we know the extent of the damp, or even how deeply it has penetrated the stone—” at the same time that the dean was saying, across him, to the third man, “And to think that the simple direction of the present lighting served to
obscure
all this from us.” The boys halted and looked respectful. The dean, not only one of the most significant figures in the close, was, after all, a school governor, a renowned fly fisherman, and father of the legendary Cosmo, whose myth inspired the younger boys rather as Che Guevara’s had fired the student revolutionaries of the sixties and seventies. The dean looked back at them from deep within his preoccupation. The architect, a childless man and consequently alarmed by anyone under twenty, began to make jocular remarks about now being able to set them a quiz on the cathedral. They regarded him stonily while Alexander explained that they should really be spending the hour on a study of the commercial rivalry between Corinth and Athens, at which the architect looked relieved and said, “Ah! The ravages of Attica.”

“What ravages?” the dean said, thinking only of those vast stone ribs above him dark with the sinister damp they had just discovered.

“Spartan, sir,” said Briggs, who was always, obnoxiously, both first and right in class. Somebody kicked him neatly and sharply on the ankleborie. “Ow,” Briggs said loudly.

The dean, his face clouded with a profound misery, drew Alexander briefly aside.

“We went up to the clerestory walkways to investigate the new lighting possibilities with Mr. Harvey here of Harvey’s Electrical,
and found that some of the triforium arches are running with damp, simply running, and that parts of the nave roof look suspiciously dark, which of course we have never seen because the old lighting is directed
down
, you see, into the body of the nave—”

“Does it look serious?”

“Yes,” Hugh Cavendish said, “yes. It does.” He looked across at the architect. “Mervyn says he isn’t happy at all—”

The boys were beginning to murmur and shuffle.

“Would you forgive me? I think I ought to shepherd this lot back; otherwise it will be discovered that we have been playing truant.”

“That won’t do for the headmaster, will it, boys?” the architect said.

A few smiled politely. Briggs got halfway through saying that as there was no higher authority in school than the headmaster, he had nobody to answer to, but was then half-garrotted from behind by a forefinger slipped into the back of his tie and twisted hard, and went into a theatrical paroxysm of choking.

“That will
do
,” Alexander said.

“But, sir—”

“You heard me.”

“Ah,” Hugh Cavendish said, “the desecration of routine.” His eyes strayed upwards. “Ought I not to contact the clerk of works this moment?”

Outside the cathedral, Henry Ashworth detached himself from the group trying to tread Briggs’s shoes off from behind and fell back beside Alexander. This was not to say anything particular but, it seemed, merely to be companionable. Alexander said, after a while, “And when are you to be presented to the dean as a full chorister?”