The Choir (27 page)

“It is usual,” the dean said with as little heat as he could manage, “to call me Dean.”

She goggled at him. He went past her into the inner office and found Denis Thornton, sharply suited, with a gold pin thrust through his collar ends under the knot of his tie, standing waiting with an official smile.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Cavendish. Do please take a seat. Will you have coffee? No? One coffee only then, Heather—”

The dean sank down. Denis Thornton sat down neatly and folded his arms on the desk. He wore several rings, all on unorthodox fingers.

“Now then. What can I do for you?”

The dean’s voice seemed to him to come from a long way off.

“I am sure you are aware of the appeal we are having to mount for the cathedral roof—”

“Well, yes, I—”

“It appears the damage is very much greater than we feared. Very much. It appears we have beetle to contend with as well as water.”

Denis Thornton made sympathetic noises but said nothing.

“I am not sure how far the suggestion has gone in the council, but I believe you were anxious to have some kind of centre, for the people, in the close—”

He looked up. Denis Thornton was watching.

“It was Mr. Ashworth’s project,” he went on, too quickly, “and I must confess that at first I could not bring myself to see things his way. The house he had in mind, the headmaster’s house, you see, is so very—”

“I’m afraid,” Denis Thornton said, “that I know nothing of this.”

“But I thought—”

“I’m not saying, Mr. Cavendish, that it isn’t a proposal we might entertain. But it isn’t on the current agenda.” He smiled at the dean. “I can see it might be a very attractive proposal.”

“I understood Mr. Ashworth had proposed it already.”

“Perhaps privately, but not in council, Mr. Cavendish. Explain to me, if you would, what you have in mind.”

“The sale of the headmaster’s house to the council,” the dean said. “It has recently been valued at three hundred thousand pounds. Of course—” He stopped.

Denis Thornton picked up a pen from the rack in front of him and held it lightly between his fingers.

“Suppose you write me a letter, Mr. Cavendish, outlining your proposal.”

The dean sighed.

“I feel that as the project began with Frank Ashworth—”

Denis Thornton laid his pen down with precision.

“It would be better to address the letter to me. Frank Ashworth is nearing retirement after all.”

“Retirement! But I thought—”

“Oh yes indeed. Younger shoulders, you know.”

The dean stood up.

“We live in a harsh world, Mr. Thornton.”

Denis Thornton escorted him back to the lift and saw him into it with slightly showy courtesy. He was borne downwards, and stepped out into the echoing foyer with a righteous tread. Duty, he told himself, duty, authority, and the cathedral.

“OK, then?” the girl on the desk said cosily to him as he passed.

He bowed very slightly.

“Thank you.”

She came round the desk and tapped past him on her high heels to open the heavy outer door for him.

“Mind how you go,” she said.

Disgusting expression, overfamiliar,
chummy
. He passed through in silence and sought his car in the park.

He came in through the garden door of the deanery. Bridget was on the telephone.

“My dear, I can’t promise anything just now. I’ve got to
devote
myself to Hugh, you know, he has so much on his plate—of course I will, the moment I can see a day ahead—I couldn’t agree more, all politics and money—I’m sure you understand—”

She caught sight of the dean.

“My dear, he’s just come in. Will you forgive? Absolutely, as soon as ever I can. Bye—”

She put the receiver down and came towards him with a curious expression on her face which, he would have said if he had not known her better, contained a trace of uncertainty.

“Huffo, where have you been? And no lunch! Let me make you a sandwich. And after such a morning—”

He moved past her.

“Thank you, but no sandwich. I had things to see to in the city, but really I am not hungry.”

“Some tea, dear, then—”

He gave a tiny sigh.

“Tea would be very nice.”

She gave a step towards him as he opened the door to the study.

“Huffo …”

He turned in the doorway and said quietly, “Tea. Thank you. Tea,” and then he closed the door gently in her face.

A
T THE END OF TERM, A STAND-IN CHOIR ARRIVED FROM A
S
URREY
parish church, and the singing boys were sent off on their various summer holidays. Henry took Chilworth to his grandmother’s for a week, most of which they spent building an elaborate camp in the small wilderness Jean permitted to the garden beyond the regimented vegetable patch. Both boys were very happy being orthodox by day and experimenting with hair gel and pop music on their Walkmans by night, when Jean supposed them in bed with the innocent copies of Anthony Buckeridge and Captain W. E. Johns she had left for them to read.

Behind them, despite the provisional choir, a lull fell upon the close at Aldminster. Alexander and Felicity, elated at the growing fund for the choir and the promise of secure tenure of their house, borrowed Sam’s Herefordshire cottage for a fortnight and drove away to walk the Malvern Hills. Half the school closed down entirely; the other half was taken over by two hundred Scandinavians on a summer English course. They were, on the whole, very quiet, and when a group of them, cornered while gazing conscientiously at the cathedral, were asked by Bridget Cavendish what they most enjoyed in Aldminster, they answered her gravely, “The cheapness of the alcohol.” Gallantly, she tried to pass this off around the close as an amusing story, to show her lightness of heart, but nobody was taken in. That she was suffering in some way was visible to everybody,
but she remained essentially unreachable. One morning, Janet Young found her inexplicably weeping in front of a scarlet sprayed slogan on the deanery wall; “Judge Dread,” it said, “says YES to the choir.”

“It is only a piece of silliness,” Janet said, putting a tentative, solacing hand on Bridget’s arm. “It is no real menace.”

Bridget stood very upright at once and blew her nose authoritatively.

“It’s for Hugh, of course. I can’t bear him to be exposed to any more of this.”

Janet made kind and murmuring noises, but was brushed off when she tried to help Bridget into the house.

“Please say nothing of this. I try to keep all these feelings from Hugh because I do not wish to add to his burdens.”

“At least
then
,” Janet said later to the bishop, “she was speaking the truth. But she wasn’t weeping for him, I’m sure of that, at least not for his pain. It’s some pain of her own—”

“Those children?”

“No. No. She looked too vulnerable for that. The last person she would ever confide in is me. Her pride wouldn’t allow it.”

The bishop bit the earpiece of his spectacles reflectively.

“The dean is not himself either. Much more withdrawn—”

Intellectually, the dean pitied his wife. He saw her misery and he was sorry for it, but emotionally he could do nothing to alleviate it. His own afflictions in the years they had spent together had not so much hardened him as alienated him, so that he could not regard Bridget with any imaginative sympathy. She had defied him, day in, day out, for almost thirty years in matters of love and life, over children and parish, and although he could not identify which straw it was that had finally broken the camel’s back, he knew his docility was ended. He was, he told himself hourly, daily, as a kind of mantra, dean. He held as dean an administrative and spiritual authority that was not only his privilege but which he would make his gift to God. Nobody, any longer, should defy that authority, not Bridget, not Alexander Troy, not Leo Beckford, not his own daughter. He felt there was a kind of purity in his authority and in the strength he
saw in it; he had inklings of a reforming zeal. When he and Bridget took their customary ten days’ fishing on the Dee, he would make the new pattern of their life very plain to her; while they were thus occupied, Cosmo, he resolved, whether he liked it or not, would go to an adventure centre in North Wales. Out of the muddle and compromise of life in the close as it had become, he resolved, a new clean, strong order should rise, with all disruptive forces subdued. Living in the undistinguished second master’s house—Mr. Vigors, a bachelor, would surely be no trouble to move into the school—would effectively subdue Alexander Troy.

Once the choir had dispersed, and their substitutes and Martin Chancellor had shaken down together, Leo took himself off to record, at the invitation of a significant company, pieces played on the organs in private chapels in some of the great houses of the north. The invitation had come, slightly irritatingly, through Mike Perring, of Ikon, who used the same pressing plant for records as did other and more celebrated companies. In a telephone conversation rich with incomprehensible references to lacquers and stampers, Mike had told Leo that not only was this invitation to be forthcoming, but that Henry’s album, “Singing Boy,” was to be given rush release through a whole lot of pop music channels. He sounded far less laconic than usual, almost enthusiastic.

Leo was relieved to leave Aldminster for a while. He thought he might have time and sufficient peace of mind to compose—a plan for a short choral work based on the story of Jonah had been gathering force in his mind ever since Henry’s recording—and he hoped he might not think too much about Sally. At least there was no chance of seeing her suddenly among the hills of Northumberland and Derbyshire. And yet he longed to see her; every day in Aldminster he hoped he would, and since he had kissed Ianthe, he had feared it too.

He told himself repeatedly that he made too much of that kiss. It was only one kiss, after all, a sort of impulsive celebration of the end of the recording session, when Mike had edited a master tape for them all to hear, and they had all been so thrilled. Everybody
was hugging and kissing then, so kissing Ianthe wasn’t in the least significant, because she was, after all, the only girl there. She had come into the organ loft and put her arms round him from behind and said, “Oh, Leo, it’s going to be so great—” and he had turned round and kissed her in the way you kiss someone when you are serious. He couldn’t hide that from himself, even when he tried. Of all the people in the world, he shouldn’t have kissed Ianthe like that. He didn’t even like her very much, and her wild and faintly grubby dark charm wasn’t to his taste at all. But he had done it, and he was in despair to find how much it affected him, chiefly—and he tried not to think this—because he felt himself committed to Sally.

He attempted to tell himself that Sally deserved it. She hadn’t been near him in weeks, had never commented on or tried to get in touch over the recording, had insisted that she be left strictly alone to make the next move. After his initial angry resentment of her attitude, he had come to see that her childish and ineffectual attempts at independence were actually the result of an enforced self-sufficiency learned
inside
a lonely marriage. What she was struggling to persuade herself was that her choice of Leo was made out of freedom, not as an escape. She had to show the world, for the sake of her self-esteem, that she could manage without any man before she elected to live with another. Sally’s pride, Felicity had said to him, had suffered at the hands of a careless husband.

“Society won’t allow a woman pride,” Felicity said. “Men are allowed it and society respects it very much and regards it as wrong that it should be damaged. But why shouldn’t a woman suffer the same loss of self-respect, the same humiliation, if she is betrayed, as a man does? Sally has had a lot of that.”

He saw all that, yet at the same time he perceived himself to be very patient and he wanted his patience rewarded. He couldn’t believe she could let so many weeks go by without seeing him; he couldn’t credit her with being other than stubborn, even cruel. He missed her. Kissing Ianthe had nothing to do with missing Sally, he was sure of that, but then kissing Ianthe had been the impulse of a suspended moment when none of his normal, important faculties
had been on duty. And as it was Ianthe, a land mine had now been buried in the sand, which somebody, probably himself or Sally, would step on and set off one day. Ianthe had written to him twice. He had hardly read the letters; he had thrown them away and hadn’t answered them. Ianthe had forestalled him there. “I know you won’t answer these,” she had written, “you wouldn’t be you if you did. But it doesn’t matter, now that I know.” The word haunted him. Know what … Of course, he told himself half the time, Sally will understand—we aren’t children, after all; and of course, he told himself the other half, it will hurl her away from me even further, just when I am, by superhuman patience, proving myself trustworthy.

To go away seemed a clean, if temporary, solution. Ianthe would not find him, might calm down; Sally might come to the end of the long walk she had set herself. He, breathing an air clear of the quarrels and complications that had poisoned the air in the close for months, might come back with revived spirits and energies to find the musical way ahead for him clear again, as well as a personal future to build.

He took his house keys round to Cherry Chancellor. She was very nice to him because she liked to see Martin in sole charge; to her mind, Martin’s sense of responsibility made him a better man for the job irrespective of his talents at the organ. When Martin had described Leo’s way with Bach as flexible, she had no idea what he meant—she would never, sitting in the cathedral, have known whether it was Leo or her husband playing, even though she admired Martin’s profession and thought of him as an artist. Now, surveying Leo in corduroy jeans and an elderly jacket of a different corduroy, she asked playfully if that was what he planned to wear to meet the duchess. Leo looked at her regular, pretty, unexciting face and said, deadpan, he thought he was rather overdressed for that.