The Choir (8 page)

“Nonsense.”

“It felt more like a concert than a service.”

“It was brilliant. It was all the congregation could do not to applaud.”

“That’s what I mean—”

A boy appeared with a laden plate.

“Sandwich, sir? Sir?”

Leo peered.

“What’s in them?”

Hooper said, “Ham, I think. It’s sort of pink, anyway.”

“You did so well,” Alexander said.

Hooper looked self-conscious.

“Thank you, sir.”

“I’d rather have cucumber, Hooper,” Leo said, “and I’d rather you finished notes as cleanly as you begin them.”

“Sorry, sir. I’ll get Ashworth. He’s got the cucumber ones.”

“Why are you so hard on them?” Alexander said when he had gone.

“I’m tremendously demanding. They understand that perfectly. Hooper knows when he’s fluffed something as well as I do.”

Henry Ashworth appeared with a huge plate in his hands, and behind him a good-looking woman in cream with her hair to her shoulders, and Nicholas Elliott.

“Sir!”

“Cucumber and a deputation—”

“Mrs. Ashworth,” Alexander said quickly, smiling, “I hope you are bursting with a very proper pride.”

“Oh, I am”

“He’s great,” Nicholas said to Leo, “really great. It sort of hit me—”

“Hear that?” Leo said to Henry.

Henry looked intently down into the sandwiches.

“I’m pleased with you,” Leo said.

Alexander put a hand on Henry’s shoulder.

“Go and feed the canons, Ashworth. They are always ravenous, particularly the honorary ones. Old Canon Savile, who died last year, always came to chapter meetings on horseback and came stamping in shouting for sandwiches because his ride had made him so hungry. Would you excuse me?”

“I owe you an apology,” Sally said, turning to Leo with the same directness that he had recognized in her son. “It was idiotic of me to telephone you the other night. If I had just had the patience to wait until today, I should have obtained the answer to my question.” She looked at Nicholas and gave a self-deprecating smile. “I telephoned
Mr. Beckford late at night to ask if he thought Henry’s voice was just good or really good.”

Nicholas, still full of the warmth of his determination to be generous, smiled back and said again, “He’s really great.”

“He’s a nice chap, too,” Leo said. “Very straightforward. No trouble at all.”

“He’s no trouble at home. Of course, he isn’t yet—”

“Hello,” Ianthe Cavendish said. She was wearing her black cotton jacket and a long tube skirt made of striped T-shirt material and a single huge silver earring of twisted wire and black beads.

Leo looked down at her with displeasure.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m the dean’s daughter,” Ianthe said. The fingernails of one hand were painted plum colour. “Remember?” She turned to Sally. “Hello.”

“I’m Sally Ashworth.”

“And this,” Leo said, cutting in, “is Nicholas Elliott. I told you about him.”

Ianthe eyed him.

“Know anything about music?”

“I did—”

“Rock music?”

“Well, I listen to it—”

“I run a record company,” Ianthe said, “rock bands. We’ve signed up some amazing new people. Hey”—she turned to Sally again—“was that your kid? The one with the great voice?”

“She doesn’t usually talk like this,” Leo said. “This is her streetwise accent for company. She can sound perfectly normal if she wants to.”

“Tell you what,” Ianthe said to Sally, ignoring him, “wouldn’t mind signing up your kid. Course, he couldn’t sing that stuff for us—”

“Go away,” Leo said, suddenly really cross. “Go away and show off to someone more impressionable. Nicholas, take her away. Tell her what you want in life and see if she can help you. See if she can actually be of use for once.”

A gleam of pathos softened the bravado in Ianthe’s eye, but she quelled it. She took Nicholas by the arm.

“Aren’t you a bit hard?” Sally said when they had gone. “She’s awfully young.”

“She’s awfully
silly
. You are the second person to accuse me of hardness this afternoon. I must be getting cantankerous, living alone and thinking of nothing but sacred music and small boys. Heavens!” he said, breaking off and laughing. “That might have been better put—”

“Isn’t it odd, that the dean’s children should all be so—so unorthodox?”

“Don’t you think it’s inevitable?”

“Do you mean because of the Church—”

“Yes.”

“You think that girl’s in love with you. That’s why you were so rude to her.”

“She thinks she is too. I’m trying to be as unlovable as possible.”

“But you make yourself very attractive if you are rude to her.”

Leo looked at her.

“Do I?”

“Yes.”

“Lord. But if I’m nice,
think
what would happen.”

“But only briefly. Very intense, but over quickly. Then she would get bored.”

“With my being nice?”

“Yes. Because it isn’t so glamorous. Moody and mean is much sexier.”

Leo smiled broadly.

“I haven’t had a conversation like this for ages. I’d forgotten what it was like. Would you like some more chapter house tea?”

“No, thank you.”

“Why did you ring me, honestly, the other night?”

Sally said without hesitation, “Loneliness.”

“But Henry was in the house and he presumably has a father—”

“He’s in Saudi Arabia. And Henry is a boy and is separate and he is a true musician, and I am not, and that makes him more
separate. I am not complaining, I am absolutely sick with pride and pleasure, but I have noticed. And since you asked me, I am telling you.”

“I never thought about mothers before.”

“No. You wouldn’t. That’s because you are a professional—”

The dean appeared, radiant.

“Ah! The two people I most wanted to see. I can’t congratulate you enough, Beckford. It was an absolute triumph. The cathedral hasn’t heard such music in years, if ever. And Mrs. Ashworth, my dear Mrs. Ashworth. What a voice! We knew he was good but today he surpassed himself. Why just that solo, Beckford? Why did we not hear more?”

“Because, Dean, talented though he is, he is still only a probationer and other choristers are more experienced—”

“We are swamped with praise,” the dean said, not noticing. “Mrs. Knatchbull from Croxton Manor brought, quite unbeknown to me, an expert on musical instruments from the V. and A. who is quite bowled over by the organ itself, never mind the restoration, and countless people, my dear Beckford,
countless
, have said to me that they can’t name another organist with your gifts of phrasing and rhythm. The chancel is absolutely thronged with visitors looking at the organ, thronged. I only wish the lighting were better. I can’t thank you enough, Beckford, or congratulate both of you sufficiently. This is a great day for Aldminster, a great day—”

When he had swirled off into the crowd, Sally said, “I mustn’t keep you. And I’ll do everything I can in future to be the right sort of trouble-free mother.”

“Then,” Leo said, surprising himself, “I shall be rather disappointed. Come to a rehearsal if you like. I mean it.”

She shook her head.

“I won’t do that. And I must go.” She held her hand out. “Goodbye. And congratulations.”

He pulled a face. “Don’t you start,” he said but he held her hand warmly and he smiled when he spoke.

She and Henry walked home together down the Lyng, and bought oven-ready chicken Kiev on the way, for supper, as a treat to celebrate,
and a tub of chocolate-chip ice cream for Henry. When they got back, Mozart was full of complaints that his supper was late, and after they had fed him, they got their own supper ready, and ate it at one end of the pine table with the television balanced at the other end, and watched an awful game whose main purpose appeared to be the humiliation of the participants, which they both enjoyed a lot. Then Henry had two helpings of ice cream, and Sally had a cup of black coffee, and they played Trivial Pursuit, and then Henry was driven up to have a bath, and Sally read him the first terrifying chapter of
Moonfleet
with the Mohune coffins bobbing and crashing about in the darkness of the flooded vault. When she had turned his light out, she had a bath herself and went to bed for a luxurious read, not of her usual by-women-for-women clever fiction, but poetry. This was a good sign. She only ever wanted to read poetry when she was happy. She climbed into bed and picked up Brian Patten, and Mozart came in and, after a few conversational remarks, settled himself down weightily beside her and purred himself into silent sleep.

Two streets nearer the close, up the Lyng, Ianthe and Nicholas shared a pizza and a bottle of Orvieto. Ianthe said she would treat Nicholas because he must be sick of school food, and Nicholas, though he didn’t fancy her at all, was pleased to be out with a girl again and relieved not to have to talk carefully and politely for a while. Actually, Ianthe did most of the talking while Nicholas ate most of the pizza, so that by the end of the evening, he knew that her elder brother was brilliant, but
brilliant
, and her sister was a weirdo, and her little brother was a real pain, and that Ikon had a really great future and that she’d like to kill Leo Beckford. She had to talk very loudly to be heard over the music of the pizza place—“Dire Straits, I ask you. Can you
believe
they can play crap like this?”—so most of the people at the adjoining tables knew about her too, and as they were very young, they became rather interested when she said, “Soon we’ll be able to pay ourselves around a grand a month—”

“A
grand
!”

She lit a cigarette and drew tremendously on it.

“Something like that. What are you going to do?”

“Don’t know. Keep hoping something will turn up.”

“Might be able to help you,” Ianthe said in the offhand voice people use when they say they’ll ring you and then never do.

“Yeah,” Nicholas said, understanding her tone. “Thanks.”

“No. Really. I’ll see about it.”

“I’ve got a bit depressed—”

“Don’t tell me,” Ianthe said. “I get right down, but I mean
down
.”

She ordered more wine and Nicholas told her about his mother and his father and his father’s new family, and being sent down from Oxford. She became quite sympathetic and when they had, between them, finished the bowl of brown sugar that stood on the table ready for coffee, and the wine, they went out into Lydbrook Street and Ianthe said she would take Nicholas down to the dockland pubs the next morning; otherwise Sunday might really
get
to them both. Nicholas went home to his room in the infirmary quite cheerfully, for him, and Ianthe went home via Chapter Yard and observed that Leo actually appeared to be trying to clear up his sitting room. He was wearing corduroy jeans and a checked shirt and he looked so isolated and sexy that her knees nearly gave way under her, and she almost knocked on the window. But then she remembered she was furious with him for putting her down in public that afternoon, so she strode on home and woke Cosmo up because she felt like listening to music but didn’t want to do it alone.

Leo had come back to Chapter Yard feeling extremely restless—no doubt the tensions and excitements of the afternoon accounted for that—and was for the first time absolutely exasperated to open the sitting-room door and find the room exactly as he had left it. It looked as if he had thrown all the contents in and then stirred them about with a giant spoon. It was so
unintelligent
to live like this, because it was exhausting and sapped creative energies. He picked up the nearest tape lying on a pile of old newspapers and colour supplements and slammed it into the cassette player and it was Vaughan Williams’s
Job
, which he wasn’t really in the mood for, but he couldn’t bear to waste ten or twenty or forty minutes hunting for the Fauré he would have preferred.

He made himself a sandwich and a mug of coffee and took them into the very heart of the muddle to assess the situation. The first move was clearly to see what there was that he could throw out. Newspapers, of course, months’ worth of flown and forgotten Sundays, easy to throw away as long as he didn’t allow himself to be seduced by a single headline as he threw; and then books back in bookshelves once he had removed all the other objects from the latter, and sheet music in a box, well, several boxes, and cushions on chairs not the floor, and clothes in a heap to take upstairs, and the wires sorted out a bit so they didn’t form this lethal sort of crochet over everything …

He started well. He went round to the Chancellors’ and borrowed two dustbin bags. “I had to smile,” Cherry said to her husband. “Leo clearing up!” He asked her for two bags, so she gave him precisely that, off a bargain roll. He took them back and filled one in twenty minutes, and then he came across the photograph book he and Judith had made when they were first married, and was about to throw that in too and then couldn’t resist one look, and there was Judith, scowling over her flute, so he sat down with the book and turned the pages. There was Judith on their penurious honeymoon in the Quantocks, wearing jeans and gym shoes; himself up a ladder painting the window frames of the first house they had, in Lincoln, with his first proper job; Judith reading in the garden with her hair all over her face; Judith asleep in a bed that looked as if a combine harvester had been across it. It had been hopeless, his marriage to Judith. She wasn’t designed by nature to live with or for anybody but herself. And yet he had pestered her to marry him, bothered the life out of her for months until she had relented at last, saying warningly that she wasn’t going to change for anybody. And she didn’t. When the rapture of the first months was over, it began to madden Leo that she would make no concessions to a shared life at all. All she wanted to do was to sing and to play her flute and to work, increasingly, for the women’s movement. They lived in squalor and acrimony. Judith took to going to Greenham Common for weekends, and then for weeks on end, and when she was arrested and Leo went to try and prevent her from going to jail, she told
him to go to hell, and she went to jail anyway. When she came out, she returned, briefly, to Rochester, where he was then assistant organist, collected her possessions, and left. They were divorced a year later, and Leo resigned his post because he was made to feel that he had to.