The Choir (12 page)

“No,” Leo said, “not necessarily. But I wish you were right.”

“I believe in marriage.”

Leo’s voice rose.

“That isn’t your prerogative!”

Alexander moved across the room and opened the door to the hall.

“For better or worse—”

“A splendid exit line,” Leo said with venom.

“Don’t be cheap.”

They looked at each other across the disordered room.

“You’re a great fellow,” Leo said, “but I can’t cope with you tonight.”

“That makes two of us,” Alexander said, and went out into the hall.

When he had gone, Leo rang Sally. She was very calm.

“He’s such a nice man. I think he was horrified. Did he tick you off?”

“Not really. He asked me to stop seeing you.”

“And?”

“I refused.”

“Oh,” she said on a breath, and then, “Did he mention Henry?”

“Yes.”

“Leo—”

“Sally, I don’t have any children but I spend a lot of time with them. It seems to me that you can’t live your life
for
them; otherwise they can’t live for themselves. If things are right for you, there is a better chance they will be right for them.”

“I admire Henry, you know, as well as love him.”

“I admire him. As well as like him. And I love you.”

“You can’t
know
—”

“I can,” Leo said, “and I do,” and rang off.

Three minutes later he rang back.

“I’ll say the same thing after I’ve made love to you, too. Only more often.”

“Leo, don’t be so head-turning—”

“You don’t
know
” he said with sudden energy, “the sheer relief of having found what I hardly knew I was looking for. Sleep well. I’ll ring you tomorrow.”

She put the telephone down and switched off her bedside light. In the street outside someone kicked an empty can along the pavement, and behind her knees, Mozart humped himself into a different shape and purred slumbrously. Upstairs, Henry would be as he had been when she had kissed him good night, rammed down under his duvet, oblivious of her and exclusive to himself. A vast happiness settled across her like a huge relaxing hand and drew her luxuriously into sleep.

T
HE ROOF OF THE CATHEDRAL, THE DEAN INFORMED AN EMERGENCY
chapter meeting, was going to cost at least a quarter of a million pounds. The parapet mullions were seriously decayed and whole sections must be removed without delay, for safety, and the rest spliced. The worst wear was at the base of the mullions, where the soft stone had worn away to allow gallons of water to lie in the angle formed by the roof and the parapet. This water had seeped its way into a large section of the south and west roofs. There was nothing for it but to strip the roof, re-line and re-lead it, and make lengths of new parapet. It would take a year to repair the roof and longer for the stonework. Cathedral funds could find perhaps fifty thousand; the rest must be found elsewhere.

One of the canons suggested an appeal. Two others at once pointed out that the appeal for the restoration of the organ was still open and the public would hardly be likely to subscribe to both. It occurred to the dean to reveal Frank Ashworth’s offer to buy the headmaster’s house, and then, for a reason he did not care to explore, he decided against it. It was, after all, quite out of the question that such a jewel should pass from the close to the council and therefore pointless to set such a red herring a-swimming.

A slightly fractious murmuring arose among the canons. One suggested a cut in the diocesan educational services to help pay for the roof, either because he forgot or because he wished to provoke
a fellow canon who was in charge of education in the diocese. Another suggested less support for the mission for the dying in Calcutta, which was particularly dear, they all knew, to the bishop’s heart; and a third, suspecting that the Historic Churches Fund had already been approached by the dean on the question of the new lighting, asked why that body should not be appealed to.

Hugh Cavendish eyed them all serenely. His drive to Croxton had indeed proved fruitful and the cheese-and-wine party soothing to his feelings, being so full of admiring praise for his loving care of the cathedral. He leaned forward and put his clasped hands in front of him on the table at which a dozen generations of chapters of Aldminster had met.

“Gentlemen. I hope you will bear with me, but I have a scheme which I need to revolve a little further in my mind before it is fit for your consideration. When we next meet, I hope to be able to lay before you my proposal for solving our present predicament.”

“Old fox,” Canon Ridley said later to Canon Yeats, helping him down the stone staircase to the close. “Something’s up. When he gets all stately like that you can hear the cogs clicking away in his brain like Meccano.”

“There’s a rumour,” Canon Yeats said a little breathlessly, trying to accommodate the stair rail, two sticks, and his colleague’s well- meant but misdirected arm, “that we’ll be selling off the headmaster’s house. Fetch a tidy bit.”

“Don’t you believe it. The dean would never countenance selling a building, let alone a good building. He’d sell
us
, if we were worth anything, like a shot. Care for a bite of lunch before you get back?”

Frank Ashworth was not surprised when the dean wished to make an appointment with him, but he was intrigued by being asked if they might meet privately. Accordingly the dean, early one evening as an extremely pretty apricot sunset threw the cranes on the docks into dramatic stork-like relief, drove down to the block of flats in Back Street, and took the unpleasant grey plastic-lined lift to the top.

“I had no idea you had such views from here.”

“I’m directly above where I lived as a boy, only sixty feet higher.”

The dean walked to the windows that gave on to the sharp rise of the city up to the crown of the cathedral.

“I’ve never seen it from here. It’s magnificent.”

“I hear I’ll have a fine view of scaffolding for the next year.”

“I’m afraid so,” the dean said easily. “Of course, we’ll make all the haste we can.”

“Scotch, Mr. Cavendish? I’m afraid I’ve no sherry.”

“A small one. Thank you. I see you are a collector of books.”

“Always have been. I don’t seem to have passed a love of books on to my son, though. There’ll be no point in leaving them to him.”

“Your grandson perhaps?” He raised his glass. “Your very good health.”

Frank Ashworth said in a softer tone, “Ah. Henry.”

“The reason I have come to see you is in some way related to Henry.”

Frank motioned him to sit down. The chairs were deep and comfortable and hideous, their sides and back covered in battered brown leather, their cushions in brown velvet. From the depths of one, the dean said, “I rather wanted to know your opinion of the choir. Knowing, that is, your feelings about what seems to you the inaccessibility of the close.”

Frank eyed him suspiciously.

“My feelings about the choir are much the same. I’m proud of Henry, but I feel he had a leg-up to get in, a chance that other kids in the city don’t get.”

“There are bursaries—”

“Oh, I know that. But they don’t get the musical training, they don’t have parents who know how to help them or have the money to help them.”

“Do you think the choir is important?”

“Important?”

“Do you think we need a choir?”

Frank looked uneasy.

“The cathedral’d lose something without music—”

“We have a wonderful organ. I am only referring to the choir itself.”

“It would be a pity if we didn’t have the choir. Part of the city’s history, really.”

The dean settled himself more comfortably than ever.

“If for some reason the dean and chapter couldn’t keep up the choir, would the council be at all interested in funding it? It would give you a much more democratic freedom in the choice of choristers.”

“I couldn’t say,” Frank said slowly, “that the council could or would take on any direct responsibility. I think most members would be sorry to see it go, although if asked, I should think most of them feel about it as I do. What does it cost you?”

“Between fifty and sixty thousand a year.”

“So the cathedral roof could be paid for in four or five years?”

“Certainly. I am faced, you see, with a choice between the building and a musical tradition. The stronger claim of the former seems to me unquestionable.”

Frank turned his glass round in his hands.

“You aren’t, you know, faced with that choice at all. You could sell us the headmaster’s house and pay for the roof at once.”

“That might, in time, become part of the bargain. The cathedral is paramount.”

“Let me make quite sure I understand you. You propose to disband the choir, thereby saving yourself fifty-five thousand a year, and you need at least outline support from the council to help fight off your critics. In return, you won’t close the door on the headmaster’s house.”

“As you said yourself, we shall continue to need money.”

“You’re going to have a fight on your hands.”

“I know that.”

“I can’t promise help.”

“But you will try?”

“I’ll think about it.”

When the dean had gone, Frank went to his eastern window and stood looking up at the cathedral. Nothing mattered for Hugh Cavendish but that cathedral; it meant so much to him that you couldn’t trust him to keep his word about anything, if it conflicted with what was best for the cathedral. But there was more to it than
just love of the cathedral, which could be seen, Frank thought, as an altruistic kind of love, and that more was power. The dean wanted to rule the close; the close was his kingdom. If there were elements in that kingdom that wouldn’t subject themselves to that rule, then they must go. The choir was an element like that, because of Alexander Troy and Leo Beckford and, interestingly, because of its growing quality, which would give it greater popularity and, in turn, some independence. The dean would hate that; independence would smack of subversion to him.… Odd that a fellow of his social standing should be so afraid of opposition and therefore react to it by ejecting it or crushing it. Frank grunted to himself. A few years in the council chamber would have taught the dean a thing or two about dealing with opposition. As to his own feelings about the choir, Frank believed most stoutly in its inequality, yet a queer chill crept into his mind at the thought of being party to its disbanding. He thought, with an undoubted inward tremor, of facing Sally over it. Even more, Henry. But if the dean were to keep his word and the house in the close were to become the realization of a cherished project, was that not a sacrifice for the greater good? Henry had been brought up just the way his wife had brought up Alan, full of illusions of privilege, but Henry had more sense than Alan, had a better character altogether, and he would see the justice of what was being done. And if the choir could be kept, for the boys of the city rather than the boys of the King’s School? Would he not then be achieving everything he wanted and thought right?

He went across to pick up the dean’s whisky glass and take it with his own into his small and tidy kitchen. He looked at the glass for a while and then said aloud to it, without particular rancour, “Twisty old bugger.”

Two days later, after early communion, the dean cornered Alexander coming out of the Lady Chapel.

“Ah. Troy. I was hoping you’d be here. I think I’ve some rather good news for you.”

Alexander, who had knelt during the service listening to the gulls round the tower in the summer morning and feeling intensely caught
up in the sheer strength of the sense of history in the cathedral, turned a rather abstracted face towards the dean and said he was glad to hear it.

“I paid a visit to Frank Ashworth earlier in the week,” the dean said, coming confidentially close, so that the folds of his robes brushed against Alexander, “and I think I have, successfully, at least postponed his interest in the headmaster’s house.”

“I’m immensely relieved, but how—”

“Deflecting his attention, really. Offering him another project to think about. But I thought you’d be glad to know.”

“I am, dean, more than I can tell you. It’s been quite unnerving wondering what might be about to happen.”

“A feeling I share. You know how I value the buildings round the close. And I am also extremely concerned that if we take steps to make the close, shall we say, more accessible to the public, that they should be the right steps. Selling an architectural gem does not really seem to me to be a right step. But of course I am biased”—he smiled at Alexander—“I have to confess it.”

Alexander, feeling that courtesy alone demanded some reciprocal generosity on his part, said he was so sorry to hear of the enormous cost and upheaval involved in repairing the nave roof.

“I may have solved that too,” Hugh Cavendish said. “In fact it was part of a bargain I struck with Ashworth to save your house. I don’t have to tell you what subsidizing the choir costs us annually, and I mooted to Ashworth the notion of the council taking the responsibility of it from us.”

Alexander stopped walking. They were almost at the south door, where a knot of clergy who had also been to the communion service had gathered, before dispersing out across the close to their various lives. He put his hand on the dean’s sleeve.

“Are you saying—?”

“Well, I hope it won’t come to that. Believe me, I don’t want to lose our young choristers, but priorities are priorities. I’m sure you agree—”

“No,” Alexander said loudly. “No.”

“My dear Troy—”

“Are you suggesting disbanding the choir to pay for the roof?”

“As I said, I do hope it won’t come to that. Ah, there’s the bishop. He’s off to London today and I must catch him before he goes. Would you excuse me? Of course, I’ll let you know any developments—”

Leo Beckford, arriving for choir practice five minutes later, found Alexander standing alone, like a great statue, ten feet inside the south door.

“Are you all right?”

“You keep asking me that—”

“You don’t
look
all right—”