The Choir (22 page)

“Yes, yes, there’s an Everyman I think, hold on—”

“I’ll see you soon,” Felicity said.

She went out into the street and the unenthusiastic sunshine. She hadn’t gone more than a few steps before Sally came running after her.

“Look, I haven’t mentioned Leo in my letter to Alan. Leaving Alan is something quite separate, that’s very important. That’s what I shall tell his father, too. It’s the truth.”

“I know,” Felicity said.

There were people pushing on the pavement round them.

“Leo made me wake up to what was so wrong, not by anything he said but by his attitude. I knew it inside all along, l’d known for ages—”

“You don’t have to tell me.”

“I do,” Sally said. “I must be realistic.”

“If it’s true, you don’t have to tell anyone.”

“I don’t want to be misunderstood.”

“It’s inevitable. People interpret actions as they wish to. Just
don’t
apologize for anything.”

“Thank you for coming.”

Felicity smiled.

“Good luck. As long as you know what you want—”

“Oh,” Sally said, laughing, “oh—” and shaking her head, she retreated back towards the shop, where the young man waited politely by the empty desk to pay.

“Look,” Mike said. “Frankly, old son, I’m not in the business of doing favours.”

They were in Mike’s sitting room, Nicholas on the sofa, Mike behind his barrage of equipment, Ianthe on the floor with an ashtray and a bottle of mineral water in front of her.

“It isn’t a favour,” Nicholas said, “it’s a business proposition—”

“You’re not going to sell a single one, I’ll tell you that for free. It’s a no-win gamble.”

“What’d it cost?”

Mike screwed up his eyes and sighed a lot and did a great many calculations on a piece of paper. Ianthe kept Nicholas fixed with a gaze that dared him to open his mouth again at this delicate juncture and put his foot in it. After five minutes of scribbling and muttering, Mike said that it wasn’t economic, even with a no-hoper like this, to make less than a thousand albums, so they were looking at a bottom line of three thousand pounds and a top one of five.

“Christ,” Nicholas said.

Mike shrugged.

“It’s what it costs.”

Ianthe said with infinite nonchalance from the floor, “S’pose we
found the money? I don’t say we can, but if, you know—would you help? I mean would you produce it for us. Just an idea—”

Mike got up and tried to prowl around in the tiny spaces left by furniture in the room. He was loosely made and dressed with throw-away carefulness and hated anyone to know that his parents lived in Sunningdale. He said, “Let me think. I’d be giving up most of a week, because I imagine you could only record at night, three three-hour sessions, a weekend’s editing. It’s a lot to ask, frankly. And I don’t know about Ikon’s name. I don’t know at all. We have our credibility to think of.”

Ianthe said, “You should come down and hear them. They’re cool.”

Mike shook his head.

“It’s just not my kind of sound.”

“If we could raise the money,” Nicholas said, with far too much earnestness, “would you come then? Can we do a deal? If we can raise three thousand pounds, will you at least come down to Aldminster?”

Mike squatted down to take a cigarette from Ianthe’s pack. Usually she would have jumped on him. He said, “OK. But no messing. It’s got to be for real.”

“Yes,” Nicholas said. His heart was pounding. When Mike got up and turned away, Ianthe grabbed his hand and squeezed it hard. Mike turned back.

“It isn’t going to work. You know that, don’t you. It can’t. Who’s gonna buy it? A bunch of old ladies, and they don’t buy from us. Three grand doesn’t grow on trees either.”

The next weekend, Ianthe and Nicholas went down to Aldminster. They were both going to stay at the deanery—Nicholas was extremely apprehensive about this—and they were going round to see Leo. Bridget put Nicholas in Fergus’s room—the walls were hung with immense fierce posters of the drawings of William Blake—and terrified him with hostessy instructions about bathwater and which lavatory to use. Ianthe had sworn him to secrecy about their mission and said he was particularly not to tell Cosmo, who would reveal it to his father out of sheer bloody-mindedness. Cosmo was back on form, having been found out distributing a pamphlet he
had concocted inciting the Asian boys at Horsley Comprehensive, of whom there were many, to wage covert war on the West Indians, of whom there were few. Cosmo’s greatest friend for years had been West Indian, which left the exhausted Mr. Miller with his usual difficulties in pinning down Cosmo’s undoubted but elusive malice.

It did not promise well, as a weekend. Meals were a fearful strain, though Nicholas was weak with gratitude for Bridget’s robust cooking, and Leo was beastly when they telephoned and said he could only see them for half an hour on Saturday evening because he was going out. He sounded really cross. Ianthe bravely said take no notice and put on her new tiny skirt and a drenching of scent, and she was quite right, because when they got there, Leo opened the door, looking exhausted, and said he was so sorry he’d been a bear but the strain was really getting to him.

“That’s why we’ve come,” Ianthe said.

It took a bit of time to explain but he really loved the idea. He smiled properly for the first time. He even said he thought he could put a couple of hundred into the record fund and when they said heavens, two
hundred
, he just said he was sorry there wasn’t more. Then he said, “Have you suggested this to the headmaster?”

“No—”

“Go over now. Go on. There’s always a lull after cricket on Saturdays. And Felicity’s home—”

“Felicity!”

“She’s been working in some hospice. She’s raring to help over the choir.”

“My parents never said—”

Ianthe and Leo exchanged glances and laughed.

“To coin an immortal phrase, she
wouldn’t
, would she—”

“Watch it, Leo,
my
mother—”

“All yours, honey child. And that’s a very fetching little attempt at a skirt you’re wearing.”

Ianthe towed Nicholas across the close at high speed. She wanted to sing. It was
working
and Leo’d been—oh, she’d save that up to think about later. And it went on working, because the Troys were thrilled with them and Felicity rang her brother in London then
and there and he promised them five hundred. He said he’d had a tax rebate.

“You might not get it back,” Felicity said.

“That’s what I thought when the tax man had it. At least I don’t begrudge it to the choir.”

They made a list of who else they could ask. Felicity said she would try shops and banks and the legion of building societies on the Lyng who owed them money morally, she said, for filling precious ground floor windows with insufferable yellow-and-blue placards about interest rates. And she would put an appeal in the paper. Ianthe said, embarrassedly, that her father would have to know.

“There’s a facility fee. The dean and chapter would charge one, Leo says—”

“But he says he’ll waive his own fees and if we don’t need the whole choir, only Henry—”

“What about the Musicians’ Union?”

“Henry doesn’t belong and I suppose it’s up to Leo what he does with his fee—”

“I can design the sleeve,” Ianthe said. “That would save a couple of hundred—”

“And the royalty?”

“Ten or fifteen per cent—”

Nicholas said sadly, “My dears, ten per cent of a thousand records selling for six pounds can’t save the choir.”

“But it’s a beginning! It might get them known!”

“If it’s promoted as a save-this-choir record, if we really wham in on the publicity—”

“Do you know about publicity?”

“A bit—”

“Look,” Alexander said. “I don’t want to be an old killjoy, but I really think you are going to be badly disappointed. I’ve got an appointment to see a King’s old boy next week who is reputed to be musical and wealthy, and dull though it may sound, I think that sort of chance is our only real one for the money we need.”

Nicholas’s face was contorted with the effort of making Alexander
see
.

“We’ve got to try—”

Alexander smiled.

“Oh, what a bunch of amateur enthusiasts—”

“Steady on,” Ianthe said, but her indignation was mock. “Some of us round here are in the business.” She stopped. “I suppose my father could just refuse to let us use the cathedral?”

Alexander began to laugh.

“Ianthe, I think we look such a hopeless star-gazing crew that he’d think himself perfectly safe.”

“Great oaks—” Felicity said. She looked round at them all and smiled hugely.

“Hadn’t someone better ask little Henry?”

Back Street depressed Sally. There was no humanity left in it now, where once there had been so much—strings of washing and prize leeks and doorstep natters and pay-night feuds. Only four little terraced houses were left, clinging together, dwarfed by the blocks of flats and offices with alarming leggy car-park spaces underneath, and they looked toothless and seedy. The new buildings had made a wind tunnel, and grimy blasts from the docks blew the litter about waist high. Sally thought that if one of the little houses still standing had been Frank’s birthplace, he would be living in it still, with his books and his refrigerator and his record player all crammed into rooms still wearing the last coat of distemper his father had slapped on to them. Traditional, tough, soft-hearted, and progressive—in all, Sally considered, riding up in the lift, twice the man his son would ever be.

When he opened his front door, Sally said, “Shall we both apologize or shall neither of us?”

“You ought to know better than to ask me that.”

“Can I come in?”

He made way for her. The big table in his sitting room was strewn with papers and the “Anvil Chorus” was thumping out of the record player. He turned it off and said, “Did Henry give you my message?”

“He said you’d been up to the school—”

Sally sat down at the table and put her elbows on it.

“Frank, I’ve come to tell you something. I’m leaving Alan.”

He said nothing.

“I can’t live like this anymore, on the coat tails of someone else’s life. We hardly know each other anymore and I don’t think I’m interested, either. I don’t trust him and even if I’m quite fond of him, I don’t love him. He isn’t my companion.” She was on the verge of saying, “I’m sorry, Frank,” but she quelled it and said instead, “I wrote to him yesterday.”

Frank went over to the imitation Jacobean sideboard that he had given his mother ten years before she died because she had craved it so, and poured brandy into glasses. He put one in front of Sally.

“I can’t drink it without soda—”

He went back silently and shot soda into the tumbler; then he gave it to Sally and sat down opposite her.

“Now then. What’s brought all this on?”

“It’s been coming on a long while.”

“He’s not much of a husband,” Frank said, “and he’s never been good enough for you. But I don’t think he’s any worse than he’s ever been—”

“It isn’t him, it’s me.”

Frank looked at her.

“What’s happened to you?”

“I’ve changed. Things have come to a head—”

“Another fellow?”

“A friend has made me see clearly. That’s all.”

Frank grunted.

“Girls like me,” Sally said, “got married because that was the next thing we did. Our mothers didn’t work; we weren’t brought up to think long-term. But I can’t mark time like this for the rest of my life. I’m only thirty-four.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Live by myself for a bit and work seriously.”

“How are you going to manage that?”

“I don’t know yet.”

He looked up.

“Did you think I’d help you?”

“No.”

“I might.”

“Frank—”

“Women have to earn their way same as any man now. Their choice. What about Henry?”

“He doesn’t know anything yet.”

Frank got up and walked to the window to look up with reluctant admiration at the cathedral. When Gwen had come to him saying she was going off with Peter Mason and she’d like to dare to see him try and stop her, he hadn’t wanted to stop her at all. He believed that secretly she had wanted a scene, had wanted to see two huge men hurling punches at each other over her like some Hollywood movie, because she grew even angrier with him when he took it calmly, and clutched little Alan passionately against her and made silly and extravagant declarations that served no purpose except to frighten the child. The last thing Gwen wanted was her own life; she wanted to be at the cosy and cosseted centre of someone else’s, and that’s what she insisted on with Peter Mason, chocolates and dinner dances and champagne, and sprays of mauve orchids on their numerous sentimental little anniversaries. She was light-years away from Sally, gazing with distaste at her brandy and talking about freedom and making it alone. Whether Gwen had really wanted to take Alan with her was doubtful too, apart from the image of sweet motherhood he allowed her to convey; probably a poodle puppy would have served much the same purpose. Frank was sure no-one ever tried to explain things to Alan—not Gwen or him or Peter Mason, who proved a kindly, indulgent stepfather. They just let these things happen to Alan and he got on with the results. He turned round.

“What will you say to him?”

“I’ll say I don’t want to live as his father’s wife anymore because we never see each other and we are too far apart. I’ll tell him he won’t understand now but he will later. I’ll tell him I’ll answer any question he wants to ask me. I won’t say anything until I’ve seen Alan.”

“Have you asked him to come back?”

“I haven’t asked him anything.”

Frank let out a long sigh. He moved behind Sally’s chair and gave her shoulder the lightest touch as he passed.

“I’m sorry, Sally. I’m in no position to offer advice and I wouldn’t anyhow. But don’t rush into anything. And if you need help, you know where I am.”

“Damn,” Sally said, “I’m going to cry—”

“No, you’re not. Not in here.”

She flung her head up.

“I’m so full of my own problems I never asked you about yours.”