The Choir (6 page)

“This—this seems all most novel. Would—would it be some kind of club?”

“I shouldn’t like to see that. I want to see the close made unselective—”

“I must consult others, you know, but I hardly feel very sanguine, Mr. Ashworth. The house is probably the best we have in the close, and the headmaster must be fittingly housed, you know, he has obligations—”

Frank stood up.

“Would you put it to the next chapter meeting?”

“Well, yes—well, I suppose I must since you request it, but really the proposal does not seem to me in the least suitable, or indeed necessary—”

“If you lived in the city proper, you would see that it was necessary.”

The dean came to stand close to Frank and peer into his face.

“What about the almshouses? The records could surely be stored elsewhere, and the council already owns half that building—”

“It would be nothing like as suitable. It has no garden. I’m not a man for second bests.”

The dean withdrew a pace.

“I assume,” he said coldly, “that your proposal is made with open and honourable intention? You are not, are you, threatening any kind of compulsory purchase order? Because I must tell you that our statutes protect us there, the statutes granted by Henry the Eighth—”

Frank moved towards the door. When he reached it, he paused and looked back at the dean.

“I wouldn’t threaten, Mr. Cavendish. I wouldn’t need to. All I’m doing is suggesting that we might do each other a bit of good.”

“A bit of
good
?”

“I would think that house is worth a tidy bit and you are always short of money in the close.”

“I think that is no concern of the council, Mr. Ashworth.”

Frank shrugged.

“Well,” he said with the appearance of unconcern that his opponents on the council had come to dread, “it’s only an idea. Give it some thought—but it’s only an idea.”

When Sandra came into Alexander Troy’s study to say that the dean was on the telephone, wanting to discuss a matter of some delicacy, Alexander’s reaction was irritated.

“Tell him that I am in a meeting and ask him to make an appointment.”

Sandra had an annoying regard for the strict truth.

“But you are not in a meeting. I’ve said you are free.”

“Then I am teaching.”

“But you are not!”

He said crossly, “This is an idiotic conversation.”

She drooped. There was no point in telling him that he had made it so.

“I’ll do what I can—”

“Oh,” he said in exasperation, “of course I’ll speak to him,” seizing the receiver on his desk. “Yes? Yes?”

Sandra went back to her office. Mrs. Troy had now been gone for ten days and there was no word from her beyond a postcard reproduction of a Turner from the Tate Gallery with, on the back,
an indecipherable postmark and the words “Don’t worry.” Alexander was carrying that postcard about like some talisman and she had seen him poring over the postmark endlessly and fruitlessly. Perhaps she must try to regard it as a compliment that his temper was so short with her; he was never irritable with the boys, after all, and he must be allowed to let steam off somehow. But how strange it was, with a strangeness that was very fascinating, to see a clergyman as vulnerable as any other man in such a situation.

“They’re real people, you know,” Sandra would say to her friends. “Underneath they are. They just can’t show it.” And then confidentially, “It’s really hard on the wives, you know.”

Before she came to work at the King’s School, Sandra would not have believed that clergy wives behaved like other wives; surely clergy wives had a kind of moral elevation that rendered them immune from resentment, neglect, jealousy, or frustration? Did they not automatically and joyfully share in their husbands’ commitment to God and humanity? She had once suggested this diffidently to Felicity Troy in a rare moment of intimacy while mopping up a flooded washing machine together, and Felicity had said, “I think you should look at what you see, not at what you expect to see. Perhaps Victorian evangelizing missionary wives felt like that, but now—”

Sandra had started looking, and it had become compulsive viewing, this quiet observance of marriages round the close. Of all of them, perhaps the bishop and his wife came closest to her early preconception, but then, the Youngs were an essentially private couple, and who could guess what struggles went on in the palace behind those tall windows that Janet Young laboriously polished herself? They were as private as the Cavendishes were public—you only needed half an eye to see how managing Mrs. Cavendish was and how she thought her children so perfect she’d let them roam the streets looking like hippies, while she went off to London once a month, all Jaeger suits and pearls. But then, she had money. It made all the difference. Sandra knew that most of the wives of the diocesan clergy managed on about the same money as she earned as a secretary, and she lived at home and had a boyfriend who had
old-fashioned ideas about her not paying for much, so her money wasn’t much more serious than pocket money. But clergy wives had to eat and dress and keep warm and bring up a family on that sort of money, and the parishes didn’t like it if they pleaded poverty; Sandra knew that at first hand because her mother’s parish out at Coombebrook had got very hoity-toity when the vicar had asked for help with logs and coal for the winter. No wonder most of the wives went out to work, and no wonder they then had so little time or energy left for parish work and thus couldn’t share in their husbands’ lives as once they might have done. Sandra had long conversations with her mother about this, which got them nowhere, really, because her mother was so very old-fashioned in her views.

She was, for instance, very stuffy about Felicity’s disappearing acts, as she called them, but Sandra knew better now, herself. She hated to see Alexander caused pain, but she knew that Felicity’s life was hard in a way that nobody who didn’t know it at first hand could possibly appreciate. If you weren’t very careful with each other, God actually could get in the way of a marriage, because it was clearly easier for some men to be more in love with the Church than with a woman. God had His impersonal side. He didn’t feel neglected or exploited or have headaches, and making Him the priority, always, had the world’s sanction. The world applauded you if you did wonderful parish work and was sorry for you if your wife was neurotic or busy or unsupportive; but what the world on the whole didn’t see was that the parish didn’t cost you one-hundredth part as much emotionally, however much you cared about it, and therefore to give your time to it instead of to a wife and family was, in essence, an escape.

Alexander came out of his study.

“The dean is coming in at six. Be a dear and fly for a bottle of fino sherry, would you? I’ve only got an inch of Mr. Cottrell’s whisky left and I’m sorry I was cross.”

Sandra said impulsively, “You mustn’t take Mrs. Troy’s going personally, you know. Because it isn’t. It’s to do with Aldminster and the close and the Church.” She blushed tremendously. “I’m sure I’d do the same if I was her.”

There was a pause, and then Alexander put a five-pound note down on Sandra’s desk.

“Funny you should say that. I often think I shouldn’t mind running away for a bit myself if I could. There’s the sherry money—sprint, will you, or the shops will shut and I’ll have to offer him Nescaéf.”

“I had a most peculiar visit this morning,” Hugh Cavendish said. “Rather caught me on the hop, I’m afraid. Frank Ashworth came and gave me a spiel about the close being unwelcoming to Aldminster citizens, and then said he wanted the council to be able to buy a property here to make some sort of social centre where people could feel at home. He didn’t, of course, beat about the bush. He said that this was the house he had his eye on.”

“
This
house!”

The dean had recovered himself since the morning.

“Naturally I made it very clear that it does not even begin, as a proposition.”

“Is he
serious
?”

“In essence, yes. I don’t think Frank Ashworth says anything idly, which is why I must report it to you, and to the next chapter meeting. I think he will pursue the idea and we must be armed. I’ve already thrown out the idea of the almshouses to him.”

Alexander got up and went to lean against the mantelpiece.

“I am absolutely appalled. Why does everything have to be downgraded, why is ‘excellence’ a dirty word, why are people allowed to behave precisely as they like and are even pandered to and provided with a beautiful setting to defile—”

“I think,” the dean said smoothly, “that Frank Ashworth is an old-fashioned socialist and believes in the essential goodness of humankind.”

“You don’t believe that!”

The dean said nothing.

“Have you come here,” Alexander said loudly, “to tell me that you intend to propose the selling of this house to the council at the next chapter meeting?”

“On the contrary. I have come to warn you of what Frank Ashworth
has in mind and to discuss with you our tactics when he returns to the fray, which he surely will.”

“Is the council behind him?”

“If it isn’t now, it soon will be. We must present a united front. The canons won’t be a problem, I’m glad to say.”

“Is this house covered by the statutes?”

The dean said carefully, “I thought it was, but I fear I was wrong. There
was
a revision of cathedral property under Cromwell, but of course this house is just too young for inclusion in that.”

Alexander sat down again.

“It was good of you to come. I am, after all, the headmaster and must live where I am told.”

The dean leaned forward and said in a very different and solicitous voice, “My dear fellow, I can’t tell you how sorry I am—”

“The pressures build up, you know,” Alexander said hurriedly, desperate to prevent his mentioning Felicity’s name, “you know how they do—”

“Indeed, indeed—”

“I’ll think about this proposal. Perhaps the almshouses really might—”

“If anyone should speak to you, perhaps you would say that the matter is under review by the dean and chapter?”

It dawned upon Alexander that the purpose of the dean’s visit had in truth been to condole with him over his vanished wife rather than to consult him over Frank Ashworth’s proposition, which, after all, he had no power to affect, one way or the other. He said rather heartily, in an attempt at gratitude, “At least we have the launch of the organ to look forward to.”

The sun rose in the dean’s countenance.

“That will be a great event. The tickets were completely sold out two weeks ago.”

He stood up and put a hand on Alexander’s shoulder.

“To tell you the truth, I see no point in selling this house. So rest assured. If the council have money to burn, they can erect some purpose-built leisure centre.” He paused. “And I will pray for good news for you.”

When he had gone, Alexander poured himself another glass of sherry and then walked the length of the house to the fearsome Victorian larder and put the bottle on an inconveniently high shelf so that he wouldn’t be tempted to have any more. Then he went back to his study for the few minutes that remained before the evening prayers he held once a week for the school, which were compulsory for the under-fourteens, voluntary for the seniors, and usually surprisingly well attended. He put this down not so much to godliness as to the boys’ instinctive recognition of the particular and mysterious atmosphere of evening worship; you could see by their faces how many of them were moved. If he needed to chastise a boy, an interview after compline was usually successful on both sides.

Felicity often said to him how enormously romantic she found men and boys to be. “Look at them,” she would say to him when the school was gathered before them. “They really believe in the possibility of their dreams. They really do.” She had sounded so yearning, almost envious. He knew she dreamed dreams and that the only outlet for the near-visionary outbursts of her imagination was these poems, worked over endlessly and painfully. He also knew of her immense womanly practicality, a realism that must sometimes have seemed to her an enemy to her poetic perception. And yet both were rooted in her, made her up, made her the elusive and adorable person she was and also, probably, drove her near to despair, drove her to run away as a physical release from a locked-together combat of mind and spirit. Perhaps—he turned the idea over gingerly in his mind—perhaps it nearly broke her up not to be able to believe consistently in her dreams and visions. He wished she would talk to him about it. He wished she would tell him what, if anything, about their way of life, or indeed him, she could not bear. She had always been self-contained, which had given her a graceful dignity that was one of the things that had drawn him to her at the outset, but as she got older, she had dug deeper into herself, and he had to resort to her poems to try to understand and they were often most obscure. She never reproached him; she always smiled and was loving but
lightly
loving, almost absentminded sometimes. It
was alarming how much he missed her. Suppose that this time she did not come back, and suppose that the council compulsorily bought this lovely house and he was put into the empty flat at the top of the school’s main building, where he would grow to dread the holidays and doubtless take to the bottle?

He straightened himself abruptly. This would not do. He had always announced that next to hysteria, he abhorred self-pity in anyone. He would go upstairs and brush his teeth vigorously before he went down to compline because the boys so delighted in sniffing the air like hounds to detect, gleefully, the faintest breath of alcohol around any member of staff after six o’clock at night. “Glugging gin in cupboards,” Leo Beckford had once said, “the minute the clock strikes six. That’s what they think we do.”

Ianthe Cavendish, down from London for the weekend, made the taxi drop her at the top of the Lyng. That way, she could slip round the close of the deanery via the little sixteenth-century yard on the northern side, where the chapter office was and the cathedral works yard, and where, in a pair of lurching timbered houses, the organist and the assistant organist lived side by side. The assistant organist, Martin Chancellor, had a wife and a baby, and a basket of lobelias and striped pelargoniums hung outside his front door and his knocker was polished and there were three clean empty milk bottles in a special little crate on the step. The curtains were drawn, and no doubt behind them Martin and Cherry Chancellor—who both taught part-time in city schools—were marking books or watching BBC2 with the washing-up done and the baby asleep and breakfast already laid for the morning.