The Choir (4 page)

Halfway up that hill, in a friendly Georgian terrace that had seen better days, Alan and his wife, Sally, had bought a house. Alan had
not wanted to live in the city, he had found a pair of cottages he wanted to convert in a village ten miles outside, but Sally wanted a job and, in any case, had had enough of the country in her girlhood, confined to a small village with her mother. In the end Alan’s being abroad so much had decided it, and they had bought the battered house in Blakeney Street. Sally went to work for an antiquarian book dealer who also ran a small wholesale wine business from his basement. A strong mutual respect existed between Frank and his daughter-in-law; he was careful not to step in to supply the lacks caused by Alan’s absences, but he could not but be pleased when he was appealed to. He felt that it was at least in part to Sally that he owed the dignity and affection of his relationship with his grandson.

“What’ll they pay you for all this honour?” he said to Henry now, over the telephone.

“Sixpence an evensong—”

Frank grunted. After a pause, he said, “That’s about sixty pounds over five years. How many hours a week?”

“Seven public services and about eighteen hours’ practice. Same as now. Grandpa—”

“Mm?”

“I’ll have to have a ruff.”

“You’ll look a right little ticket, won’t you?”

“Mum says are you coming to see us.”

“What, now? Is she looking tired?”

“Wiped out,” Henry said cheerfully.

“Tell her to go to bed with a stiff Scotch. I’ll see her another day.”

“She says can she have a word. Half a sec—”

Sally said clearly, “Won’t you come and have a Scotch with me, to celebrate?”

“Have you eaten?”

“I sort of picked at Henry’s tea—”

“I’ve got a steak here. Shall I bring that?”

“Yes,” she said, suddenly hungry.

“I’ll not stay long.”

“I’d like to see you …”

There was a pause and then Frank said, “Clever little chap,” and rang off.

His refrigerator was full of the solid, uncompromising food he had always preferred; it was full because he liked food. He took out the steak, a couple of big tomatoes, a piece of tasty cheddar, and a paper bag of huge open mushrooms, which, though still travesties of proper field mushrooms, were a marked improvement on the anaemic little white buttons that abounded in supermarkets. He found five pound coins as a tip for Henry on this particular day, and carried the whole lot down to the eight-year-old grey Rover that was one of the best-known cars in the city and was regarded indulgently by most traffic wardens.

Sally had laid the table in the big all-purpose ground-floor room in Blakeney Street, and had pinned up her heavy hair rather loosely and changed her pink sweatshirt for a black one. She didn’t kiss Frank; they never had. Henry, on the other hand, hopping around in tracksuit pyjamas, put his arms round his grandfather’s neck and kissed him with warmth.

“Hold out your hand.”

Frank put the pound coins in a ring on Henry’s palm.

“Whoopee,” Henry said.

From the stove, Sally said, “And thank you, perhaps?”

“Thank you very much.”

“Where’s this voice come from,” Frank said, “that’s what I’d like to know.”

“That’s what I like about it,” Sally said, unwrapping the steak, “not knowing, just having it.”

“Don’t you put garlic on that.”

“Mr. Godwin stinks of garlic,” Henry said, “all the time. We can’t breathe in Latin. Will you come to my service?”

“Try and keep me away.”

Henry looked awkward. His grandfather did not believe in God.

“You won’t mind?”

“Mind?”

“Being in the cathedral?”

“Why should I mind? I’ve often been in it. It’s my cathedral. It’s a beautiful place.”

“Mr. Beckford says it isn’t in the first division of English cathedrals, but it jolly well ought to be near the top of the second.”

“Bed,” Sally said, above the frying.

Henry squirmed on the arm of Frank’s chair.

“Shall I play you something?”

“Something quick, you monkey, then bed.”

Henry rushed to the piano.

“I’ll play you the Gloria, syncopated, then it sounds like Chinese music, listen—”

When he stopped, he shouted, “Ying tong yiddle I po!”

“How old are you?” Frank demanded.

“Nearly eleven.”

“You’re a twit. Anyone ever told you?”

“Only you.”

“Henry,” Sally said, warningly, “cheek.”

Henry stooped and kissed his grandfather.

“Night—”

“Night, old fellow.”

“Mum, Mum, night—”

“I’ll come and tuck you in. Don’t forget your teeth.”

The door banged behind him. “Ying-tong-ying-tong-ying-tong,” sang Henry on the stairs and then, without a pause, the first line, clear and strong, of the “Magnificat.”

“Is he really good?” Frank said.

“I don’t know. I’m not musical enough to know. But he has only been a probationer for six months. The whole thing has been so sudden, even realizing he could sing at all—”

She carried two plates of steak across to the table and put them down opposite each other.

“This is a treat. Henry and I eat sausages and eggs mostly. As for a joint—there’s no point for two.”

There was an airmail letter propped between the salt and pepper mills.

“Any news from Alan?”

“Yes,” Sally said. “Read that if you want to.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“I probably shouldn’t say this to you but I can’t help feeling that the arrangement Alan and I have is not what marriage is
for
.”

Frank looked at her. She was a good-looking girl and she didn’t lack courage. His heart smote him for her but all he said was, “It wouldn’t be like you to give up.”

She motioned him to sit down and pushed the dish of mushrooms towards him.

“I didn’t say anything about giving up. All I said was that I think marriage is not about living as we do, quite separately. Well, not for me, anyway.”

Frank took a bite.

“Would you like him to come home?”

There was a pause and then Sally said, “Not particularly.”

“Is there something you would like me to do?”

“Thank you,” she said, and smiled at him, “thank you, but you can’t. I just thought you ought to know my state of mind. That’s all. Come on now, what’s the gossip from the city?”

When he left Blakeney Street, Frank took the Rover up the Lyng to the close and parked it behind the sixteenth-century almshouses, which now held the county archives in one half and a firm of solicitors in the other. There was no moon, but the sky was light still behind the black bulk of the cathedral. Frank looked at it with affection. He was rather afraid that in old age the idea of a god was going to become more natural to him and that even now, the fact that the cathedral was a spiritual building set it apart, gave it a significance and a stature that it would not have had if it were a castle or a moated manor crowning the close’s green dome. But then, that very stature alarmed some of the people of Aldminster; he doubted that more than a few hundred citizens regularly used the cathedral and he felt a huge moral indignation, as well as a great sadness, that they should be daunted by something that had been put up by men like them for men like them.

The close was very quiet. It was much quieter than the Lyng at
ten o’clock at night, much quieter than the docks or the newly cobbled precinct where he had fought alongside the junior chamber of commerce to bring in wine bars and eating places, to keep life there, after the shops shut. And here was the close, this great green lung offered up to the heavens high in the heart of the city, empty of people, absolutely empty, no sign of life beyond a few quiet lights shining from windows or from the wrought-iron arches over gateways. Beautiful, yes, in its quirky, unplanned way, harmonious, severe, but dead,
dead
. No drunks, even, nor drug addicts gasping away in furtive corners, as they did in the graveyards of the city’s churches at night, propped against tombs, half dead themselves, some of them. Ivies grew in those churchyards, and yew, and both made rank black holes to hide in, but the smooth sweep of the close afforded no shelter; try to hide there and the empty grass would of itself offer you up to whatever was watching you from up there behind the stars. The old hobos would tuck themselves in corners of the buttresses sometimes, but then they, in their wandering freedom, had nothing to hide, no score to settle by self-destruction. There was one up there now. Frank could see him, a black bundle in the angle made by the south porch against the walls. He’d go up to him in a minute and give him a quid or two and chat a bit. The last one he’d talked to had remarked that though it was a fine cathedral, it couldn’t, to his way of thinking, hold a candle to Wells. He had smelled like an old wet dog with rotten teeth.

Frank had been glad to see him. He was glad now to see the glow of another tramp’s cigarette and to observe, silhouetted against the dim light of the far end of the close, the black outline of what was undoubtedly the dean taking his dog for a late-night run. Frank shook his head. Nice enough fellow, the dean, but as far removed from the world of ordinary men as if he were not one himself. All that breathed for him was those stones up there, block upon block, while all Frank could see was the hands that had put them there, every one in its place. He turned away and made for the headmaster’s house, instinctively drawn, as so many people were, by its particular charm, as well as its quality. Two lights were on, a faint one on the first floor, a stronger one in the two long windows beside the
front door. The curtains had not been pulled. Frank could see in quite clearly, could see Alexander Troy in an armchair, with a clipboard and papers on his knee and a bottle of whisky beside him, and through the glass he could hear most strong and distinctive choral music, which Henry would have told him was Benjamin Britten’s
War Requiem
. Troy looked extremely solitary, and at first Frank’s sympathy was aroused, and then he raised his eyes and looked along the lovely length of the darkened house, unused and empty. “Bloody waste,” Frank said to himself. He clenched his fists in his trouser pockets and glared at the unconscious Alexander. “Bloody
waste
.”

When Frank had gone, Sally Ashworth cleared up a bit and turned on the television and turned it off again and made a shopping list for the next day and fed the cat and put the sheets in the washing machine, ready to turn on in the morning, and then went upstairs to look at Henry. He lay like everyone’s idea of a child asleep, humped in a prawn shape under his duvet with only a crest of hair visible, giving off an aura of being most thoroughly asleep. Beside him, on the floor, lay the grey woollen trail of his school clothes, a comic book about Asterix, and a crumpled photocopy of Masefield’s “Cargoes” with “Learn by heart for Tuesday’s prep” written across it in Henry’s still-babyish hand. Above his bed he had pinned a large photograph of the choir on an outing to Worcester, and had drawn a large red arrow from himself to the white margin, where he had written “Henry Francis Ashworth aged 10.” There was also a photograph of his parents, posing self-consciously for him in the front doorway, and dozens of the cat, who was called Mozart and had a distinct sense of humour.

Sally had done the room up during a phase of trying to
throw
herself into interior decor. It didn’t last long, because real life reasserted itself and the vast bouquet of dried flowers in a willow basket she had carefully put as a focal point in the hall proved to be directly in Henry’s flight path from front door to kitchen, as well as to contain, Mozart insisted, untold menaces within its rustling depths. She had stripped and waxed all the wood in Henry’s room, covered the walls
with paper striped like mattress ticking, laid rush mats on the floor, bought a bean bag and a cork pinboard and an anglepoise lamp. Three years later, Henry had strewn his pervasive but impersonal masculine detritus across the room, all but obliterating its careful, liberal good looks. Tonight, she noticed that he had clearly been helping the rush mat to unravel, for a long pale snake of it was uncoiling from the central mass and making for the door. The anglepoise was bent, the pinboard was empty except for thumbtacks arranged to say “A Team,” and Henry had said a few days before that he would very much like it if his walls could be brown.
Dark
brown.

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—”