The Choir (30 page)

He had left his car at the small park across the close at the top of the Lyng. A path ran across the grass towards it, and he was about thirty yards down it, away from the cathedral, when someone, coming up quickly behind him, said his name. He stopped and turned. Ianthe Cavendish, her hair flying away from her face, said rather breathlessly, “I saw you in the cathedral—”

“I’d no intention of getting mixed up in a service. I went in for a bit of quiet—”

She looked extremely overwrought. She came very close to him and said in a rush, “There’s something you ought to know.”

Ianthe conformed to no ideal of womanhood Frank had ever cherished; girls of her sort hardly seemed to
be
women, but rather sexless darting insect forms, waiting to grow up into something more substantial. He had scarcely exchanged ten words with Ianthe all her time in Aldminster; there was not, and never had been, the smallest reason for communication between them. He said now, suspiciously, “I don’t listen to gossip.”

Ianthe seemed to hesitate for a minute, but she said, all the same, “It isn’t gossip. It’s true and it affects Henry.”

“Henry!”

“I’m not a sneak,” Ianthe said, “and I wouldn’t say anything except—” She stopped, took a breath, and said very clearly, spacing her words, “Henry’s mother is having an affair with Leo Beckford and they are planning to get married.”

By nothing did Frank betray he had even heard her.

“I haven’t made it up,” Ianthe said. “Leo told me so himself yesterday. You can ask him if you don’t believe me.”

Frank said, “I believe you.” He looked woodenly ahead.

“Henry doesn’t know,” Ianthe said confidingly.

“That wouldn’t be any of your business.”

“Look, I’m not a troublemaker. I just thought you ought to know—”

Frank made to move away.

“Just make sure,” he said, “that you don’t think everyone else ought to know too.”

She said nothing. He took a step away.

“No doubt you have your reasons for telling me such a thing.”

She turned and began to walk quickly back towards the cathedral, her head bent as if she were crying. It occurred to Frank that she might have been in love with Leo Beckford herself. It wouldn’t have surprised him; nothing seemed to surprise him. After all, he’d half known all this for weeks, half known that some very rough waters lay ahead for Henry, whatever happened. He was angry with Sally for dawdling, for not making up her mind, but he felt no pity for Alan, son or no son. To his mind, Alan had walked away from his human responsibilities, step by step, these last few years, into his own peculiar freedom, and he was about to be asked to pay the price for that. But Henry, there was Henry. Only Frank’s essential fair-mindedness, which remembered his own behaviour to Alan thirty years before, checked his rising tide of fury against Henry’s parents. But he wouldn’t sit still and watch anymore; he wouldn’t allow it to take its own wandering course, as Sally seemed to allow it to. He would make something happen; he would telephone Alan and insist that he come home.

He reached his car and let himself into it. Late-afternoon light was settling over the close, gilding the walls of the cathedral, and
beyond it the russet bricks of the headmaster’s house, and farther still, the smooth eighteenth-century face of the deanery. He looked at the deanery for some time. “Vengeful little bitch,” he said to himself and turned the key to start the engine.

In the last night of their stay at the cottage near Wyche, Felicity woke with a premonition. It seemed to her so clear and possible that she remembered her new resolve to be as unseparate as she could, and woke Alexander. She thought it was typical of his essential niceness of character that his first half-waking question was to ask her if she was all right and had she had a bad dream. She said not exactly, just a foreboding so real she knew it would happen.

He put on his bedside lamp.

“About what?”

“The house.”

“My darling—”

She turned her face towards him.

“I’m perfectly certain that we shall get home and find it sold behind our backs.”

“Heavens—”

He lay down again.

“But Frank Ashworth withdrew his proposal and it would break Hugh’s heart to sell it anyway.”

“I don’t think it has anything to do with promises or logic.”

“If you’re right,” Alexander said, feeling for her hand under the bedclothes, “shall we be broken-hearted all over again?”

She thought for a bit, staring upwards.

“Not—quite so badly.” She turned back to him. “Would we have to go to the second master’s house?”

Stanley Vigors was a bachelor, an efficient, upright, unimaginative man whose personality had rendered his house as inviting as a medical waiting room. It was an unprepossessing house in any case, an insubstantial-feeling brick box put up in the fifties with metal window frames and mean proportions. It had a long, bleak sitting room, which faced the games fields, and the back of the house looked down into an unfriendly strip of garden planted with trouble-free
shrubs. Stanley Vigors would be just as happy, no doubt, to move his serviceable and charmless possessions into the empty flat at the top of the school building—in fact, he might even prefer the extra involvement of life there.

“You could make it lovely,” Alexander said.

“Not
lovely
—”

“Well, a lot lovelier.”

“If it is happening,” Felicity said, “why don’t we seem to mind more, even at three in the morning?”

“I think we know it would be good for us.”

“What, morally—”

“No, no. Us. You and me.”

She propped herself on one elbow.

“Has it been bad for us to live somewhere lovely, then?”

He said bravely, “It’s been extremely
difficult
.”

“Our marriage, you mean.”

“Yes.”

She lay down again.

“How very
odd
to feel like this. Not frantic.”

“Not odd. Just the usual thing. Of having one’s prayers answered in a way one never thought of.”

She said warningly, “Alexander—”

“When am I going to be able to mention God again?”

“You do all the time.”

“Of course.”

He reached out to switch the light off. In the darkness Felicity said musingly, “I wonder if I could write there.”

“When we got here,” Alexander said, “you said you wondered if we could ever make love in this bedroom. Well, we have. Several times.”

“I do appreciate you—”

“Go to sleep,” he said, but she could hear that he was smiling.

In the morning, they packed the car, handed the key in to the pub in the village, and drove south to Aldminster. On the way, they didn’t mention the house at all, but instead talked of Daniel and how their Christmas present to each other must be air tickets
to America to see him. They discussed the probability of their having been rotten parents and the certainty of Daniel’s having been a very difficult child, a child who had seemed to want to pull away from them even at the moment of birth, arching his back away from embraces and screaming with all the force of his brand-new lungs. Alexander confessed how dreadful he had always felt at being able to love some of the boys he taught so much more easily and comfortably than Daniel, and Felicity said that she loved him, all right, but it was a kind of love that wore one down to the bone and seemed to get nothing back. In a mood of intense harmony and closeness, they arrived back in the close to find that Sandra had left a pot plant on the kitchen table to welcome them home, and that among the letters that had accumulated in their absence was one from Hugh Cavendish formally announcing the imminent sale of the house.

Nobody boarding the plane with Alan Ashworth at Jeddah could have failed to notice his distress. He seemed like a man in deep shock and, for all his years of travelling, needed to be buckled into his seat by an air hostess and then didn’t seem able to see her when she offered him sweets to suck for take-off, or hear her when she asked if he would like headphones. He was wholly unused to introspection, wholly unused to denying himself whatever he wanted at the moment he wanted it, wholly unused to thinking through the consequences of his actions. He had actually been summoned to the telephone while at the hospital, to be told by his father that if he didn’t hurry home, he might have no home to hurry back to. Honesty had compelled Frank to add that it was probably too late anyway. Alan had gone back to the delicate and miraculous machinery they were installing in the new intensive care unit and, to his crew’s horror, he had burst into tears. He told them that because he had worked so long away from home, his wife was leaving him. It was a dreadful scene and no-one knew what to do with him except find him a smuggled paper cup of illicit brandy from somewhere and take him back to the house in the expatriates’ compound where he had lived for over a year, and where most of them had been
frequently and vividly entertained. The air conditioning had been on full blast as usual, and Alan had sat shivering in one of his imported Italian armchairs, clutching a framed photograph of Henry, while people battled with the Saudi telephone system to make arrangements for him. He kept begging for reassurance.

“You’re not a bad man,” one girl said to him, a girl whose best friend he had slept with, “but you are a bloody fool.”

It was, thank heavens, a British Airways flight, so there was drink. After a double brandy and a half bottle of claret with lunch, he felt a little better, sufficiently better at least to feel a growing anger at Sally for walking out on him. He had only taken this job so that they could pay off the mortgage on Blakeney Street and move a rung up the housing ladder, and he had, by so doing, sacrificed two years of watching his son grow up. He was just beginning to make a name for himself as a wizard at this kind of thing—only last week, he’d had an offer of an even bigger installation in Oman—and it was hard to feel that Sally couldn’t be even a little bit proud of him, proud of a husband who was now summoned by sultans. When he thought of her in bed with someone else, he wanted to kill her. For her to sleep with another man was a betrayal, the worst wound. They’d sometimes discussed affairs—usually in the calm after a storm over some little philandering of his—and he always knew she wasn’t really the type, she took relationships too seriously. That, of course, could be his strength now, Sally’s seriousness. He drained his glass. Perhaps there was a glimmer of hope yet. He couldn’t, frankly, see Sally with another man, and in any case, Henry had always been everything to her, she’d never do anything that would harm Henry.

His eyes filled with tears at the thought of Henry. When Alan himself had been taken away by his mother to live with her and Peter Mason, he had felt, through the inevitable alarm at the upheavals and the rows, a secret relief. Alan had always feared his father, feared him and felt him to be a stranger. Peter Mason was an accessible, indulgent man who liked to talk jocularly of “the family,” meaning Gwen and Alan, and who had never frightened anyone in his life. But as Alan grew up, he perceived there was little to admire in Peter Mason beyond this jolly kindness, that his stepfather
believed in getting by in human terms and no more, and that his own exacting and often unapproachable father at least lived by principles and aims greater than those dictated by personal convenience. Neither Frank nor Alan knew, by then, how to come much of the way towards each other, but the worst gulfs were bridged, and their closest moment came when Henry was born, and they drank brandy together in the pub outside the hospital gates and felt fond of the whole world. Alan, who had inherited too much of his mother’s shallow sentimentality, made emotional avowals of the life he would give his son—“No offence to you, Dad”—and declared that they had all learned from past mistakes. Before Henry was two, he had accepted his first foreign job, four months in Cairo, and it had gone on from there. “Not again,” Sally had cried, too often, and always he had said, eyes wide with hurt, “But it’s for you and Henry!”

Why else, he told himself now, head back against the seat, eyes closed, would anyone stay in Jeddah for two days, let alone two years? Couldn’t Sally see, or was she too spoiled by what he had given her and the freedom of her life to do what she wanted—she didn’t
have
to work, she chose to—to care anymore? He saw himself suddenly alone and comfortless and the picture was quite over-whelming. Sally would
have
to care, she was bound to, it would be all right when he saw her again. It was all a nightmare, really, and soon he would wake up and find it had been no more than a salutary fright. Perhaps he should change his ways and freelance in England for a while, less money of course, but he’d be prepared to sacrifice that, even though the injustice of what was happening to him smote at his heart painfully.

The journey from the airport exasperated him, overcrowded and complicated, as did the thin grey greeting of an English summer day. He went into the lavatory on the train to Aldminster and washed and brushed his hair and regarded his sad, strained face in the little looking glass. You could see he was pale, even under his tan. Sally couldn’t fail to see how deeply and honestly he was affected; she mustn’t fail to, because the thought of losing her, standing there in the train’s unpleasant and swaying little cubicle,
was suddenly so terrible he thought he might be going to faint. He felt sick and sweating; he could not believe that it was possible to suffer like this; he could not believe that he was still alive while having to endure such pain.

Aldminster station looked exactly the same; it didn’t even appear that the estate agents had changed their notices since he went away. He went out of the station like an invalid and found a taxi and asked for Blakeney Street. He sat in the back, shivering from time to time in his tropical-weight suit, looking out with alarm at the sheer familiarity of the roads and streets down which they were passing.

Sally opened the front door while he was paying the taxi, and stood waiting at the top of the steps. She had grown her hair and she was wearing a long buff cotton skirt, very full, and a white T-shirt, and she wasn’t smiling. He went up the steps slowly, crooked because of carrying his bag in one hand, looking up at her.