The Choir (2 page)

Nicholas Elliott, hammering in two white-painted posts to mark the end of the hundred-metres track, was accosted by a broad and affable Labrador.

“I hope you don’t mind dogs,” the dean of Aldminster said.

Hugh Cavendish had been dean of the cathedral when Nicholas was head chorister. He was much the same—upright, grey-haired, well-groomed, with the air of a country squire about him. Boys who went to the deanery in Nicholas’s day reported a pair of guns in his study—Purdeys—and rod clips in summer on the roof of his car and the fairly regular arrival of a delivery van from Berry Brothers and Rudd of St. James’s.

“Down, sir,” said the dean.

The Labrador flopped immediately into the pose of a Landseer lion. The dean turned a smile of enormous charm upon Nicholas.

“I believe you are Nicholas Elliott.”

Nicholas’s face was illumined.

“Do you remember, sir—”

“No. To be truthful, I don’t. But I have just met Mr. Beckford in the close and he told me about you. I am glad that it was your instinct to return to Aldminster.”

“There seemed nowhere else—”

The dean allowed a tiny respectful pause to follow this admission, and then he said, “And I expect you have spoken to Mr. Troy.”

Nicholas looked awkward.

“There seems to be some sort of problem this morning.”

“I don’t suppose any day in any school passes without one. Come and see me. You remember where the deanery is?”

“Certainly, sir.”

“Come and have a cup of tea with Mrs. Cavendish and me.”

“Thank you.”

“Heel!” the dean said to the Labrador.

“He’s terribly well trained, sir.”

“He is—when my children refrain from undermining him.”

A memory of last night’s row filled the dean’s mouth with sourness. Cosmo—removed from the King’s School for disruptiveness and now whipping up anarchy in Aldminster’s best comprehensive—Cosmo had come into the deanery drawing room, prodded the Labrador arbitrarily out of a profound slumber, and begun to haul him towards the door. The dean said sharply, “Where are you taking that dog?”

“To watch
Picnic at Hanging Rock
with me. He’s read the book, you see, and now he’d like to see the film—”

Mrs. Cavendish shot out a hand and gripped her husband’s arm.

“Huffo—”

The door shut loudly behind the boy and dog.

“I cannot
bear
this whimsical humanizing of animals,” the dean had said furiously. “It demeans both the human and the animal.”

“He only does it to provoke you, Huffo—”

“Don’t call me Huffo.”

“And you
are
provoked.”

“Yes,” the dean said, “I am,” and then he had gone up to the little attic room, which the children had painted black, where they kept their television and the squalor of their wayward culture, and he had had a full-volume shouting match with Cosmo. Cosmo had won by putting on a tape of UB40 tremendously loud and then lying peacefully down on a bean bag and smiling up at the ceiling. On his way down to the drawing room, the dean had sat down on the staircase and had a moment of black despair, so filled with self-disgust that he could not even, for the moment, pray. The Labrador had waited in good-mannered sympathy two steps below.

He held his hand out now to Nicholas Elliott.

“About four. After evensong. We shall look forward to seeing you.”

He would not, he resolved, walking away across the playing fields towards the green dome of the close, whose gentle summit the cathedral rode like a great ship, think about Cosmo. He would think instead about the organ, that great tour de force of restoration that was nearing completion, which would give Aldminster the distinction of possessing about the only double-case seventeenth-century
organ to survive in its bold and original glory. He had adored those three years. Day after day he had gone exultantly into the cathedral while the Victorian overpainting of the pipes and pipe-shades and cornices came away to reveal the vigorous colours of the Restoration, tassels and flowers and birds, oak trees and roses, a girl holding an apple, King David playing exuberantly upon the harp. He had made it his business to understand the infinite ingenuity necessary to insert a modern organ into an ancient case, and was very happy to have the organ builders instruct him in the use of different metals for different pipes, and extol to him the wonderful advantages of an electromechanical organ. With them he rejoiced over the unique size of the Pedal Open stop—“Eighteen twenty-one,” he said in awe to his wife, who was trying to telephone the window cleaner—and the soundness of the original choir case and exclaimed over the unsympathetic hands that had perpetually rebuilt the instrument for two centuries. It had made a bond between him and Leo Beckford that ordinary intercourse would hardly have achieved between men so unalike.

He paused at the edge of the close and looked up. There it was on its green summit, incomparably moving and majestic. He would never tire of it, never feel any labour too great for its preservation and restoration. No dean of Aldminster had ever known more about this cathedral than Hugh Cavendish or cherished its fabric with such zeal. He walked slowly down its great length, and then down the gradual slope of the close beyond to the dignified eighteenth-century ashlar face of the deanery.

His wife was on the telephone six feet inside the front door. He hated the instrument’s being in the hall—so uncivilized.

“Must fly, my dear,” Bridget Cavendish was saying. “It’s the day for the fish man. Fish Monday, community shop Tuesday, Evergreen Club Wednesday, never a dull moment …”

At three o’clock, Alexander Troy took some of the younger boys for ancient history. That way, he got to know each boy in the school. A lot of them, he thought, looked extremely tired, almost strained, which was wrong for nine-year-olds on a summer afternoon
who had only played cricket since lunch. They were doing the Peloponnesian Wars. Nobody was concentrating well. After a while, Alexander gave up and read them an extract from Mary Renault’s
The Last of the Wine
, and three out of seventeen went gently to sleep on their desks. When the bell rang he had an impulse to say, “Sorry I’m not much fun today,” but there was no need; they had a childish acceptance of authority, good or bad, and would not think to judge him.

Sandra met him in the corridor outside.

“Mrs. Troy rang.”

“What, now? Is she on the telephone now?”

“No. She wouldn’t let me fetch you. She said to tell you she was very well but that she must be alone for a while.”

“Sandra. Sandra, why didn’t you
fetch
me?”

“Mrs. Troy said not to.”

“Haven’t you the wit to see when it is right to disobey?”

Sandra opened her mouth to say that Mrs. Troy would only have hung up if she had left the telephone to fetch the headmaster, but shut it again. He looked so utterly wretched.

“Was that all she said?”

“Only that she probably wouldn’t stay in London.”

“Where is she in London?”

Sandra said falteringly, “She didn’t say.”

“And you didn’t ask?”

“No.”

Sandra said timidly, “Remember when she went to Suffolk—and then when she went to the cottage at Picklescott. And when she saw Daniel off to America and stayed in London then—”

Alexander was abruptly smitten by the unwanted, unbidden reflection that neither his wife nor his only child seemed to want to stay permanently near him. He said with an effort, “Mr. Beckford says we have a homeless old boy in our midst. I’d better see him. Do me good to see another victim of the arbitrariness of life.”

“He’s gone to tea with the dean, Headmaster. I saw him going across the close a few minutes ago.”

“I thought he was
our
piece of news.”

“I expect the dean has only borrowed him.”

Alexander looked down at her gratefully.

“Fetch a bemused old clergyman a cup of tea, there’s a good girl. What a prop and stay you are.”

“And who,” said Mrs. Monk, who ran the kitchen, looking at Sandra’s illuminated face a minute later, “ ’as been giving our Miss Miles red roses, then?”

The dean opened the door of the deanery to Nicholas. Inside, in the stone-floored hall lit by a marvellous Venetian window on the graceful staircase, the Labrador waited, and a tall man in a purple cassock.

“In your day,” Hugh Cavendish said to Nicholas, “Bishop Henry was here. Now it is Bishop Robert. Bishop, this is Nicholas Elliott, who was our head chorister ten years ago.”

“I am glad you have come back,” the bishop said.

Nicholas said, “Yes,” and felt feeble.

“I was in Calcutta ten years ago, while you were singing here.”

Nicholas nodded.

“What has brought you back?”

“Well—I—I ran out of money and I couldn’t think where else—”

“We are going to give him tea,” the dean said encouragingly. “Ah.”

Robert Young moved forward and took Nicholas’s hand.

“Come and see me. You remember where the palace is.”

“You are all being so kind.”

“It is what we are here for.”

Nicholas said suddenly, “I wish I hadn’t needed to come, you know, I wish I could have managed—”

“When you have about three weeks to spare,” Bishop Robert said, “I will tell you a few things I can’t manage. Not managing is part of the human condition. And now I must return to the palace my poor wife can hardly manage.”

When the door had closed behind him, the dean said, “We give him a chauffeur-gardener and he will hardly use him. We put two cleaning women into the palace and they have been sent to work
at the council offices, which of course they are thrilled about because they get forty pence an hour more, and Janet Young does it all herself. If the palace garden wasn’t visible in part from the close, I don’t suppose he would use Cropper at all. And as for the House of Lords … Now, come in and have tea. We eat it in the kitchen.”

The kitchen table bore the kind of tea Nicholas knew about only from old-fashioned stories set in prep schools. He wasn’t sure he had actually ever seen a plate of bread and butter before. Mrs. Cavendish, who was large and handsome and wore a print frock and pearls, was very gracious with him and told him that she had spent her girlhood in the bishop’s palace in Wells, just in case he mistook her for other than a member of the church’s aristocracy.

“Dog collars all my life, you see.” She gave him a roguish glance. “Do you think I might
break out
one day? Have some plum jam. I made it myself. Is that the telephone?”

“It is,” the dean said, “and it is bound to be for you.”

As she left the kitchen by one door, another opened, and a black-clad boy with rusty spires of black hair slid in. He looked at Nicholas and said, “Hi.”

“Hi.”

“What,” said the dean in a voice of suppressed outrage, “have you done to your hair?”

“Dyed it,” Cosmo said. “A packet from Boots. It’s Gothic.”

“Gothic.”

“Black is Gothic. So are these.” He lifted his feet and displayed pointed suede boots laced up round silver studs. “I’m a Goth now. See?”

The dean seemed paralysed. Cosmo held out a thin hand smeared darkly with hair dye and smiled at Nicholas.

“I’m Cosmo.”

“I’m Nicholas—”

“Go to your room.”

“Jesus,” Cosmo said, “not
again
.”

Bridget Cavendish came back from the hall saying, “It was Denman College. They want me to lecture on drying flowers again.” She saw Cosmo. “How simply disgusting you look.”

He looked pleased.

“I know.”

“I have told him to go to his room.”

“I’m a Goth, Ma.”

“Don’t shout, Huffo. He can’t stay in his room until he is back to normal. Nicholas, you aren’t eating. Have some coffee cake. Women’s Institute. Frightfully good. Cosmo, go and wash.”

Cosmo moved to the sink.

“In the cloakroom.”

“I’ll take Ganja, then. Come on,” he said to the dog. “Wash paws time. I say,
he’s
black. He’s a Goth too.” He turned to Nicholas with a smile as full of charm as his father’s. “Father calls him Benedict, after the saint, but I call him Ganja. Don’t I, Father?”

When he had gone, Bridget said, “Cosmo is fourteen. I’m afraid his elder brother and sister egg him on a bit. Now, I want to hear all about
you
. Have some more cake?”

When Nicholas left the deanery the sun was slipping down the west face of the cathedral and filling the panes of the great window with copper-coloured glass. He felt extremely full and equally disorientated. Everything was the same: the same interesting buildings formed their picturesque ring round the close; the same green grass flowed smoothly down from the cathedral on all sides, dotted with the same sorts of tourists reading the same old guidebook; and there in the southwest corner was the gap in the buildings where the Lyng began, the ancient highway that ran a steep mile from the cathedral to the estuary, lined with ancient lime trees and new green litter bins. The first of the bins was visible from the close. It said “Please Throw It
HERE
!” on the side. What a surprise and irrelevance it must be, Nicholas thought, to the ghosts of the medieval citizens of Aldminster toiling up the Lyng to their devotions; but then, medieval litter was biodegradable.

He walked across the close to the top of the Lyng and looked down. The estuary gleamed down there beyond the roofs and office blocks and industrial buildings, its sunset-glittering surface pierced with the bony silhouettes of cranes on the docks. He looked at it
all critically. The city was pretty ugly really, redeemed only by the hills on which it was built. He never used to think it was ugly, but that was one of the penalties of growing older, that you stopped accepting things and started judging them. That was particularly true of people. That was why he didn’t think about his parents much, because the hero father had revealed himself to be callous and dull and the heroine mother to be an hysteric. He scuffed at the grass and noticed that one of the layers in the sole of his trainers was peeling away from the next one. So what. Here he was, twenty-three, penniless, without ambition or qualification, full of Women’s Institute coffee cake, and shortly to be walking barefoot. Nowhere to go but up. Or down, where there wasn’t even any cake. He was touched by the small glamour of his predicament. He turned away from the Lyng and, adopting the jaunty survivor’s air of a modern Huckleberry Finn, began to lope around the edge of the close, back towards the King’s School.