The Choir (19 page)

The evenings were a bit better if he managed to sort of grab one of the partners and get taken with them wherever they were going. They were quite nice to him in an absentminded way but he still felt very much that he was living on the edges of other people’s lives rather than in the centre of his own. The money was great, though, and so were the cast-off clothes Mike gave him from a shop in Covent Garden—Nicholas went, dressed in them, to gaze in awe at the window—and sleeping on Mike’s sofa was a lot better than the infirmary, though not as good as Leo’s second bedroom. Mike had a distinct taste for the Gothic, and a tailor’s dummy dressed as a cowled monk stood at one end of the sofa, and a vast black paper bat crouched on a hat stand at the other. The sofa itself was covered in harsh dark velvet, and Nicholas was given a duvet striped in scarlet and black. He had to keep his clothes in a series of carrier bags behind the sofa. There wasn’t anywhere else to keep them because most of Mike’s little sitting room was taken up with all his stuff for editing, reel-to-reel recording machines, and mixing desks; you had to be careful about razor blades on the floor because if he got really carried away editing, he just dropped them. Ianthe told
Nicholas he was a brilliant editor. Mike didn’t seem to want any rent beyond being reimbursed for food and given a weekly bottle of vodka, so Nicholas felt he should clean up a bit and this really bugged him, not because he resented Mike, but because he felt himself to be so bloody feeble; he
always
seemed to end up mucking out the lives of people who were having a much better time than he was.

In his pleat-top tweed trousers and buttoned-up shirt, he went down to Aldminster after a month and stayed with Leo. It wasn’t a great success. Leo was in a funny mood and wouldn’t talk about anything. Nicholas asked him about the choir.

“Doomed.”

“You mean the council won’t take it on and the dean won’t change his mind?”

“Yes.”

“What are you going to do?”

“It doesn’t appear to be up to me.”

Nicholas tried something else.

“How’s Sally?”

“Fine.”

“Will I see her this weekend?”

“No. She’s gone to her mother.”

“Her mother!”

“She has to think, she says.”

He went over to the school and everyone was out playing games and the place had the odd suspended air it usually did on Saturdays. He saw Alexander in the distance and he looked awful, and then he went into the kitchen to see Mrs. Monk, who was getting cricket teas and gave him a ham sandwich. She said, “How’s London suiting you, then?”

“It’s great.”

“You look a lot tidier, I will say that.”

He smiled. No one else had noticed.

“How’s everything here?”

“Same as usual. Mrs. Troy’s not back and the choir’s going at Christmas. Mr. Troy ran a petition and got two thousand signatures but it doesn’t seem to have got him anywhere. Shame, really. Now
you can help me slice these Swiss rolls. Half an inch only or they don’t go nowhere.”

Nicholas went to choral evensong on the Sunday, and could have wept. They sang part of a Tallis motet and he thought, If the time comes when nobody can hear this sound anymore, it will be the end. Totally awful. When the service ended he would have liked to follow the choir back into their vestry but of course he couldn’t, so he hung about until Alexander came out of his stall and down the steps to the nave, and noticed him.

“How good to see you back. How is everything?”

“Great, sir.”

“Are they keeping you busy?”

“Flat-out.”

“I’m so glad.”

Nicholas said hesitantly, “Mrs. Monk said the choir has to go at Christmas.”

“I’m afraid it looks like it. There’s plenty of support for it vocally but no money at all. And the repairs to the roof start the first week in August. Nobody in the close seems quite to think as I do.”

“Mr. Beckford does.”

Alexander looked away.

“It’s—quite complicated for him. Going back tonight?”

“Yes. Got to—”

“Good luck,” Alexander said and smiled. “Keep your fingers crossed for all of us here.”

When he got back to London, Mike wasn’t in his flat but, surprisingly, Ianthe was. She said the shower at her place had bust so she’d come to use Mike’s. She was sitting on Nicholas’s sofa wearing a black dress like an elongated T-shirt, and fish-net tights, and her hair was wound up in a towel turban. She and Nicholas had by tacit agreement steered clear of each other since he came to work for Ikon, in case his employment should look unprofessional to the others, and this was the first time they had seen each other alone. She was very nice to him about his work at the office and then she asked him with elaborate casualness, flicking through a magazine as she spoke, if he’d seen Leo that weekend.

“Yeah. I stayed with him.”

“And?”

“He’s fine. Not very talkative this time. The choir’s going at Christmas. I guess he’s pretty upset.”

Ianthe dropped the magazine.

“Going? You mean my father’s won?”

“The council’s turned it down and the cathedral lot can’t afford it anymore. I’m upset too. I know you don’t like it but it’s great music—”

“I didn’t say I didn’t like it. What did Leo say?”

“Not much. I
said
.”

“Will he be out of a job?”

“They aren’t doing away with the organ. It’s just the choir.”

Ianthe looked at the ceiling.

“Anyone else there? At Leo’s?”

Nicholas opened his mouth to mention Sally and out of pure instinct shut it again. However much he owed Ianthe for his job—and by early afternoon each day, he felt he owed her nothing—his first and fundamental loyalty was to Leo. He knew Ianthe had this thing about Leo, and he also knew she could be pretty vicious if she wanted to be. To tell her about Sally might expose Leo to attack. He said, “He was working all weekend. I went to the school and saw a few people. I think the choir’s really on his mind.”

“Can’t anyone
do
something?”

“Seems not.”

“Make us a coffee, Nick. I had a really heavy session last night. But we might be signing up those people who make the Jesus and Mary Chain look like yesterday’s school dinner.”

Nicholas obediently went out into the tiny scarlet-painted kitchen and made Ianthe a mug of coffee, and then he carried it back to her and said suddenly, “
We
could help.”

She stared.

“What d’you mean—”

“We could make a record. We could make a record with Leo on the B side and Henry Ashworth on the A side and market it through the rock channels. Something unusual—”

“Don’t be daft,” Ianthe said.

“I’m not daft. Think about it.”

“I think you’re daft. We’re not in the choirboy business.”

“That’s why people’d listen.”

Ianthe took a swallow of coffee and said wearily, “Pack it in, Nick. It’s cracked, your idea.”

“It’s not cracked, it’s really cool—”

She shouted, “Shut up, will you?” and Nicholas waited for a few minutes and then he said, “It’d help Leo,” and went off to the bathroom.

When he came back, Ianthe didn’t say any more, but she had recovered her temper. Nicholas made some bacon sandwiches for them both, and she told him about her weekend and this guy Gerry who would not, I mean
not
, leave her alone. It was such a drag. She’d get back tonight, she betted Nicholas anything, and there’d be more flowers outside and he’d have had to go to a hospital, for Christ’s sake, to get them because it was a Sunday. Nice car, though. A black MG. When she got up to go, she said, “It’s a screwball idea, but I’ll think about it. Don’t say anything to Mike.”

When Mike came in around midnight he’d got a girl with him and wasn’t about to say anything to Nicholas. They went straight into the bedroom and Nicholas put some music on pretty loud because there was nothing worse than hearing them through the wall together when he was alone with the bat and the monk and the red duvet Ianthe had spilled ash on. Funny though, he didn’t feel as depressed as he usually did when Mike brought a girl back. He felt a bit excited in fact, not by what they were doing in the bedroom, but about his idea. If he could think of something really unusual for Henry to sing …

Hugh Cavendish gave a long interview to the
Echo
. He had planned what he would say carefully, and how he would emphasize what was no more than the truth, that the cathedral choir cost the chapter about a third of its annual income. He would be very detailed about the repairs to the roof, and he would not mention the new lighting scheme unless he was asked. It was scheduled to go ahead in the new year, and he had found all the money it would cost, bar three
thousand, which he rather hoped the lord lieutenant might give in memory of his mother—who always complained the cathedral was too dark—in return for a commemorative plaque in her favourite chapel. On the domestic front, there was at least a temporary, if frail, truce between himself and Bridget and Cosmo, and as far as the close was concerned, he had the tacit support of everyone and the vociferous support of several, including the archdeacon, who, at ten years his junior, very much hoped for his own decade as dean when Hugh Cavendish retired.

The reporter wanted to know what he felt about the council’s turning down the choir.

“I have to confess that I understand their reasons. Of course I am sorry, very sorry. We all regret so much that we have, like too many other cathedrals, fallen victim to our times. We must just rejoice that we possess one of the finest organs in England and an organist who can do it full justice.”

“Creep,” Leo said when he read the report of the interview. He was feeling sore and angry himself, uneasy that Sally might decide for freedom rather than for him, unable to make his way back to Alexander, who was battling quite alone, it seemed, and looking careworn and haggard.

Frank Ashworth, reading the same report, felt very similar. The dean’s “understanding” of the council wasn’t, to him, worth the breath it was uttered with, and if he really understood the present council, he had no business to be dean. He was just planning his next move, that’s all. He was just softening the council up so that when Frank proposed the purchase of the headmaster’s house, he’d get another ignominious defeat. The dean was, in Frank’s view, going to put the council in his pocket if he could, and paying them compliments was only the beginning. If Frank had anything to do with it, the dean wasn’t going to find everything going his way. Frank did not intend to be outsmarted twice, nor divided from his rightful allies on the council by clever ecclesiastical manoeuvrings. The dean had asked Frank to submit a very detailed proposal about the council’s plans for the headmaster’s house; that request was just a feint on the dean’s part, Frank was sure, but he was going to devise
a scheme no council could possibly reject. A small and unpleasant inner voice asked him if he were not confusing socialist aims with personal revenge, and it took some time to silence it. That small voice was one of the penalties, he had come to know, of living alone.

The governors’ meeting of the King’s School took place in the seldom-used dining room of the headmaster’s house. It was a beautiful room, with an intricately plastered coffined ceiling and a massive fireplace, in which the few pieces of furniture Felicity and Alexander had managed to spare for it looked rather forlorn. There was a battered old Victorian expanding table, which they had bought years ago for fifteen pounds for Daniel to set up his trains on, and which Felicity had shrouded in an immense tablecloth that reached the floor all round; ten eccentric chairs that bore no relation to one another; a small bookcase; and, sprouting from one wall, a vast black iron bracket from which hung several bunches of dull gilded metal grapes that Felicity had found when they were first married and that she was sure would one day find its perfect place. The governors eyed it nervously as they came in. The chair directly beneath it fell to the lastcomer, Canon Yeats, who could never hurry because of his sticks. He gave it a beseeching glance as he sat down.

There were twenty-two governors, a huge turnout. Alexander had to rustle up a dozen more chairs and ended up sitting next to the dean, who was the chairman, which he would have preferred not to do. They went smoothly through all the usual business, the plans for the new sports hall, the report from the finance and general purposes committee, the extension of places for girls from the sixth form to lower down the school, and then the dean said with no change in his voice, “And now gentlemen, the choir.”

The atmosphere froze. Alexander looked round the room, at the canons and councillors, at Frank Ashworth, at the admirals and lawyers and magistrates and educators who made up the governing body, and only in Canon Yeats’s eyes did he meet with a gleam of sympathy.

“We are faced with an ineluctable decision. I fear it is no longer even a matter of choice. Above a third of the chapter’s income is consumed by the choir, and modern economic circumstances simply do not permit us the continuation of such a luxury—”

“It is not a luxury,” Alexander said loudly.

The dean half turned in his chair.

“Mr. Troy.”

“The choral tradition of England is the finest in the world, and unique in its particular form. It is not simply a vital part of our heritage, it is something so important to humankind that we have no business to deny it to future generations—”

“I think it might be said,” the archdeacon almost shouted from the far end of the room, “that we have no right to deny future generations the intact fabric of our cathedral either! The house of God must take priority!”

The chief education officer of Aldminster, who had come to regret his attack on Frank in the council chamber and wished to make amends, quoted as nearly as he could remember what Frank had said to him.

“It’s quite wrong to favour some children of this city above others. Our policy must be to discourage the rank injustice of privilege.”

Frank looked at him coolly. He would never have used an emotional word like “rank” himself but he knew an olive branch when he saw one. He gave the education officer the smallest nod and said, “The council much regrets it cannot see its way to taking the choir up. Our feeling is not simply that the money is more needed elsewhere, but that social distinctions in our city only make for trouble, which it is our job, as councillors, to avoid.”