The Choir (7 page)

Leo’s curtains were not drawn, as Ianthe had known they wouldn’t be. In fact, there was only one curtain, as Leo had taken one down once to wrap up a friend’s fiddle for a journey to London and the curtain had never come home again. He had a centre light and four lamps and he was sitting at the piano with a score and a pencil, wearing a green T-shirt that said “Warwick University Ski Club” on the back, which was typical of Leo, since he had never been near either Warwick University or a ski slope in his life. The walls
of the house rose straight up from the cobbles of Chapter Yard, so Ianthe could lean her elbows on Leo’s windowsill and gaze without hindrance. If she tapped on the glass, he’d be unlikely to notice—she had never in her life known anyone who concentrated as Leo did. In her best fantasies she imagined that intensity of concentration focused entirely on her; it would be like being consumed by a wonderful flame. She gazed at him, at his thick, rumpled hair and the knobs on his vertebrae through the T-shirt as he hunched over the keyboard, and his lovely narrow bottom on the piano stool and his really intelligent hands—she could only see the right one properly—moving knowledgeably over the keys. It was a real turn-on, standing watching him secretly like this. She’d think of it when she saw him come in to the cathedral on Saturday for this service to celebrate the restoration of the organ, and he’d be in his surplice and might even have brushed his hair, and only she would know about the private messy lovely Leo underneath.

She banged on the window. He didn’t hear, so she banged again, more loudly, and he turned around crossly and came to open the window and said, “Go away, Ianthe, I’m working.”

“How did you know it was me?”

“Because it’s Friday and I saw your mother today in Sainsbury’s.”

“Can I come in?”

“No.”

“Five minutes?”

“There’s this huge concert service tomorrow and a thousand last-minute things—”

“I’ll only stay a second, I
promise
. I’ve got some vodka.”

“You drink too much, you and Petra.”

Ianthe put her bottle down inside the room and attempted to heave herself over the sill.

“Use the door,” Leo said rudely, not helping her.

Breathlessly, she wriggled in, falling into the muddle of books and boxes on the floor.

“Five minutes,” Leo said, “and then I’m throwing you out.”

She beamed at him.

“It’s so lovely to see you.”

“I’m in a horrid mood and I don’t want to see anyone.”

She made her way into the disgusting kitchen and returned with two smeary tumblers.

“It always comforts me that this house is so revolting that no woman but me could bear it. At least the mess proves to me you haven’t
got
a woman.”

“Who’d have me?” Leo said unwisely, pouring vodka.

“Oh, me, me, me—”

“I don’t count you.”

Her face grew suddenly sad and serious.

“One day you
will
count me.”

He looked at her. She said, “Do you think I’m at all pretty?”

He went on looking. After a while he said reflectively, “You are good-looking, I suppose, but you look so contrived and aggressive. Why don’t you let your hair just lie down like hair likes to?”

“I like looking like this.”

“Then don’t ask me if I think you’re pretty.”

She said humbly, “I sort of need to know.”

If she became submissive, she always set off warning bells in Leo’s head.

“I’ve got a cause for you to put your extra energy into.”

“Oh, what, what?”

“A waif has turned up in our midst, an ex-chorister, unemployed and homeless. You talk to him and see if there’s some way anyone can help him. He’s becoming a slight problem and he is weighing on my conscience because it was me who found him weeping in the cathedral. I’ll introduce you.” Leo looked at his watch. “Time’s up. Out you go.”

“Oh—!”

He picked up the vodka bottle and rammed it into the pocket of her huge black cotton jacket.

“Out.”

“Will you kiss me?”

“No,” Leo said. “Kissing’s become very dangerous. I’ve no idea where you’ve been.”

“Oh, Leo—”

He took her arm and propelled her out into the hall towards the front door.

“Good night, Ianthe.”

She opened her mouth very wide. He said, “If you scream, you will wake Baby Chancellor and then Cherry will come out in her dressing gown and be very, very severe with you for a long time and I shall become quite furious because I need to get back to work. Good night.”

When he had shut the door, she subsided on to the step and sat there, hugging her knees and dwelling with pain and pleasure upon what a beautiful, wonderful bastard he was and her fervent hope that she would never outgrow the agony of her present feelings.

N
ICHOLAS
E
LLIOTT HAD TO BORROW A JACKET FROM THE SCHOOL
secondhand clothes cupboard to make himself suitable for the cathedral. This was Sandra’s idea. Everyone else had gradually lost interest in him for the simple reason that his problem would not seem to solve itself and he remained helpless and slightly hopeless, and so responsibility for him filtered down to Sandra, who was appalled that he proposed to attend the organ service dressed in the jeans and sweatshirt layers that seemed to compose the whole of his wardrobe. Mrs. Cavendish produced some grey cord trousers that had been given to her for Cosmo, and that Cosmo had been outraged at the thought of wearing, and in the secondhand clothes cupboard, Sandra found what she thought was a very nice Donegal tweed jacket and some black shoes and an Old King’s tie. Docilely, Nicholas allowed himself to be dressed like a doll and felt a distinct comfort at being in someone else’s clothes, however alien to his taste. When he reached the cathedral he even felt pleased to be wearing the tie; it became his badge of belonging.

Sally Ashworth, coming into the cathedral beside him and thinking how touching it was that an Old King’s boy should wish to attend the service, found herself quite overwhelmed at the sight before her. She knew the cathedral perfectly well, could point out to visitors the massive splendour of the Norman columns with Early English clerestory arches above and then of course the Perpendicular
chancel and cloisters, the glory of the place—but today, packed with people, banked with luminous pyramids of flowers, its huge holiness had such power and drama that it seemed quite unfamiliar, a new and marvellous place altogether. The afternoon sunlight was pouring, as the original builders had meant it to do, through the high south windows, raising the eye up and leading it along the great ribs of the roof to the tracery above the chancel. Everybody seemed to be looking up, from the orderly rows in the nave to those sitting on the stone steps below the font and along the ledges of tombs. The wandsmen were all wearing their medals and expressions of conspicuous responsibility and Leo, elevated in his loft, was playing a Bach fugue. Nicholas, struggling through the crowded aisles to reach his special seat—allotted to him by Alexander—below the choir screen, remembered his own organist saying before every piece of Bach he taught them, “Now, you will find this very moving.” Leo was playing beautifully. The faces all down the nave, row upon row, were reflecting, whether their owners meant them to or not, the effects of the building, the music, and the occasion, full of power and excitement and peace. Nicholas ducked down into his seat and looked upward. If a dove had suddenly appeared on one of those soft, full shafts of light up there, he wouldn’t have been at all surprised. The Bach ended, the congregation creaked uncertainly back to life for a moment, and then, to herald the opening of the service, Leo began triumphantly upon Widor’s Toccata from the Fifth Symphony.

Halfway down the nave, Sally Ashworth, dressed in a new cream linen suit with big shoulders, wondered what he was playing. She thought he had been playing Bach, but she had no service sheet because they had run out after the first two hundred and fifty people, and the people on either side of her didn’t seem to have one either. Henry had a very small solo, and although of course she would know it was him when he began, she wanted to know when to anticipate his beginning. She had asked him over breakfast if he was nervous.

“I am a bit now, but I won’t be then. You don’t think about it.” And then he had added, “I a bit wish Dad was here.”

This had shaken Sally. They didn’t talk about Alan much, being so preoccupied with living their busy lives, so that Sally forgot to include him sometimes, even mentally, and then felt a mixture of guilt and defiance. Henry almost never mentioned him, except to refer occasionally to things they had done together that he had enjoyed, and Sally could not remember his ever wishing out loud that Alan was with them.

“You could write and tell him,” she had said lamely.

“That wouldn’t be the same.”

“No.” She looked intently at him. “I’m sorry, Henry.”

“It’s not your fault—”

“That doesn’t stop me being sorry. For you, I mean.”

“Other people’s fathers,” Henry said without particular resentment, “live at home and go to work here. They sometimes bring them to school and things.”

“I suppose Dad feels he couldn’t get as good a job here. Not so interesting or so well paid—”

“Hooper’s father’s a pilot and
he
comes home.”

“Henry,” Sally said gently, “there’s nothing I can do about it.”

He said nothing. She waited a moment and then he asked if he could take a Crunchie bar with him and thundered upstairs, leaving her with the guilty knowledge that she
could
have done something, if she had wanted to. Sitting in the cathedral now, the guilt was still there. She hadn’t even written to Alan for over a fortnight; he didn’t know Henry was to sing a solo, let alone be made a full chorister. She usually felt cross when she thought of Alan, which was manageable, but today she felt miserable, which wasn’t manageable at all. She tried to concentrate on the building. She could hear Henry’s voice chanting “Perp Perp Perp” to her after a lesson on the cathedral’s architecture, because, like all his classmates, he had been enchanted by the irreverent abbreviations of architectural terms. Perp but no Dec. She had an awful feeling she was going to cry.

The organ was doing something heraldic and announcing. The huge congregation rose thunderously to its feet, and the cathedral procession headed by the great Cross of Aldminster attended by
taperers and servers entered the nave. Behind the servers came the choristers and the men of the choir, called lay clerks, and the assistant organist and Alexander Troy and then a stream of clergy, honorary thises and residentiary thats, and then the verger and the dean, looking quite exalted, and then the chapter clerk and last the bishop, whose troubled conscience at the precise purpose of this service, so emphatically insisted upon by the dean, was writ large upon his face. Tears rolled down Sally’s cheeks, and at the sound of her sniffs, her neighbor, a kind-looking woman in a tidy frock and a beige cardigan, turned and handed her a perfectly laundered handkerchief.

“My son is a chorister,” Sally said apologetically.

The woman melted further.

“Ah—”

She whispered to her husband. He peered round her at Sally with kindly interest. Henry’s neat brown head bobbed through the choir screen and vanished. Through the loudspeaker system, the dean welcomed the congregation, and with a sound like a distant drumroll, they resumed their seats.

“We thank You, Lord,” Hugh Cavendish said with the particular diction he kept for the cathedral, “for revealing Yourself to men and women, and for providing them with the great gift of music, with which they may celebrate and praise You.”

Crouched by the choir screen, Nicholas Elliott felt joy and despair sweep over him in wonderful waves.

“To You, O Lord,” the dean said, “we the people of Your Cathedral Church of Aldminster dedicate this organ, restored to all its original glory and rebuilt with all the skills of modern organ builders. With this great instrument, O Lord, may we demonstrate to You our undying zeal for the beauty of holiness.”

In his stall, the bishop winced, very faintly. The beauty of holiness meant very different things, he feared, to Hugh Cavendish and to himself. Hugh Cavendish’s beauty rose wonderfully before him on the south side of the choir, its pipes rich and glowing, a tribute to man’s belief in the glory of God, no doubt about that, but to the bishop’s mind, a peripheral tribute, for all its splendour. For him,
the beauty of holiness lay in the infinite possibilities of the human soul, constantly overlaid but never quite extinguished by the beastliness of human behavior. The bishop was capable of anger, but he was not capable of hate. The synod made him furious, with its selfish inclination towards the individual view rather than a pastoral desire to present a united and
helpful
front to its troubled flock. Divided all the way and almost
proud
of it. That was as wrong as to spend all these thousands on an organ, however historic, while the world dwelt in ignorance and want. He must not think of it now. He must think of the music. Across the aisle from him, an almost perfect boy’s voice began on an anthem. “Praise the Lord,” he sang, “Oh my soul. Praise the Lord.”

“Henry!” Sally thought. It was an astonishing sound. All round her people had adopted that particular stillness of intent listening. Henry stopped and an alto took up the tune and then a second one. Nicholas Elliott put his head on his knees. He had been a treble. But that boy was better than he had ever been, and he was singing with a directness that was quite extraordinary and strangely dignified. Nicholas sat up. It was pathetic to feel envious nostalgia,
pathetic
. He made a resolution. After the service he would go round to the chapter house, where all the clergy and the choir were going to have tea, and he would find the boy and he would tell him he had been
great
.

“What a success,” Alexander said to Leo later, in the chapter house.

Leo looked slightly shifty.

“Funny thing, all the music was sacred but the atmosphere was rather
secular
—”