The Choir

by Joanna Trollope

  “Scotch, Mr. Cavendish? I’m afraid I’ve no sherry.”

  “A small one. Thank you. I see you are a collector of books.”

  “Always have been. I don’t seem to have passed a love of books on to my son, though. There’ll be no point in leaving them to him.”

  “Your grandson perhaps?” He raised his glass. “Your very good health.”

  Frank Ashworth said in a softer tone, “Ah. Henry.”

  “The reason I have come to see you is in some way related to Henry.”

  Frank motioned him to sit down. The chairs were deep and comfortable and hideous, their sides and back covered in battered brown leather, their cushions in brown velvet. From the depths of one, the dean said, “I rather wanted to know your opinion of the choir. Knowing, that is, your feelings about what seems to you the inaccessibility of the close.”

  Frank eyed him suspiciously.

  “My feelings about the choir are much the same. I’m proud of Henry, but I feel he had a leg-up to get in, a chance that other kids in the city don’t get.”

  “There are bursaries—”

  “Oh, I know that. But they don’t get the musical training, they don’t have parents who know how to help them or have the money to help them.”

  “Do you think the choir is important?”

  “Important?”

  “Do you think we need a choir?”

  Frank looked uneasy.

  “The cathedral’d lose something without music—”

  “We have a wonderful organ. I am only referring to the choir itself.”

  “It would be a pity if we didn’t have the choir. Part of the city’s history, really.”

  The dean settled himself more comfortably than ever.

  “If for some reason the dean and chapter couldn’t keep up the choir, would the council be at all interested in funding it? It would give you a much more democratic freedom in the choice of choristers.”

  “I couldn’t say,” Frank said slowly, “that the council could or would take on any direct responsibility. I think most members would be sorry to see it go, although if asked, I should think most of them feel about it as I do. What does it cost you?”

  “Between fifty and sixty thousand a year.”

  “So the cathedral roof could be paid for in four or five years?”

  “Certainly. I am faced, you see, with a choice between the building and a musical tradition. The stronger claim of the former seems to me unquestionable.”

  Frank turned his glass round in his hands.

  “You aren’t, you know, faced with that choice at all. You could sell us the headmaster’s house and pay for the roof at once.”

  “That might, in time, become part of the bargain. The cathedral is paramount.”

  “Let me make quite sure I understand you. You propose to disband the choir, thereby saving yourself fifty-five thousand a year, and you need at least outline support from the council to help fight off your critics. In return, you won’t close the door on the headmaster’s house.”

  “As you said yourself, we shall continue to need money.”

  “You’re going to have a fight on your hands.”

  “I know that.”

  “I can’t promise help.”

  “But you will try?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  When the dean had gone, Frank went to his eastern window and stood looking up at the cathedral. Nothing mattered for Hugh Cavendish but that cathedral; it meant so much to him that you couldn’t trust him to keep his word about anything, if it conflicted with what was best for the cathedral. But there was more to it than just love of the cathedral, which could be seen, Frank thought, as an altruistic kind of love, and that more was power. The dean wanted to rule the close; the close was his kingdom. If there were elements in that kingdom that wouldn’t subject themselves to that rule, then they must go. The choir was an element like that, because of Alexander Troy and Leo Beckford and, interestingly, because of its growing quality, which would give it greater popularity and, in turn, some independence. The dean would hate that; independence would smack of subversion to him.… Odd that a fellow of his social standing should be so afraid of opposition and therefore react to it by ejecting it or crushing it. Frank grunted to himself. A few years in the council chamber would have taught the dean a thing or two about dealing with opposition. As to his own feelings about the choir, Frank believed most stoutly in its inequality, yet a queer chill crept into his mind at the thought of being party to its disbanding. He thought, with an undoubted inward tremor, of facing Sally over it. Even more, Henry. But if the dean were to keep his word and the house in the close were to become the realization of a cherished project, was that not a sacrifice for the greater good? Henry had been brought up just the way his wife had brought up Alan, full of illusions of privilege, but Henry had more sense than Alan, had a better character altogether, and he would see the justice of what was being done. And if the choir could be kept, for the boys of the city rather than the boys of the King’s School? Would he not then be achieving everything he wanted and thought right?

  He went across to pick up the dean’s whisky glass and take it with his own into his small and tidy kitchen. He looked at the glass for a while and then said aloud to it, without particular rancour, “Twisty old bugger.”

  Two days later, after early communion, the dean cornered Alexander coming out of the Lady Chapel.

  “Ah. Troy. I was hoping you’d be here. I think I’ve some rather good news for you.”

  Alexander, who had knelt during the service listening to the gulls round the tower in the summer morning and feeling intensely caught up in the sheer strength of the sense of history in the cathedral, turned a rather abstracted face towards the dean and said he was glad to hear it.

  “I paid a visit to Frank Ashworth earlier in the week,” the dean said, coming confidentially close, so that the folds of his robes brushed against Alexander, “and I think I have, successfully, at least postponed his interest in the headmaster’s house.”

  “I’m immensely relieved, but how—”

  “Deflecting his attention, really. Offering him another project to think about. But I thought you’d be glad to know.”

  “I am, dean, more than I can tell you. It’s been quite unnerving wondering what might be about to happen.”

  “A feeling I share. You know how I value the buildings round the close. And I am also extremely concerned that if we take steps to make the close, shall we say, more accessible to the public, that they should be the right steps. Selling an architectural gem does not really seem to me to be a right step. But of course I am biased”—he smiled at Alexander—“I have to confess it.”

  Alexander, feeling that courtesy alone demanded some reciprocal generosity on his part, said he was so sorry to hear of the enormous cost and upheaval involved in repairing the nave roof.

  “I may have solved that too,” Hugh Cavendish said. “In fact it was part of a bargain I struck with Ashworth to save your house. I don’t have to tell you what subsidizing the choir costs us annually, and I mooted to Ashworth the notion of the council taking the responsibility of it from us.”

  Alexander stopped walking. They were almost at the south door, where a knot of clergy who had also been to the communion service had gathered, before dispersing out across the close to their various lives. He put his hand on the dean’s sleeve.

  “Are you saying—?”

  “Well, I hope it won’t come to that. Believe me, I don’t want to lose our young choristers, but priorities are priorities. I’m sure you agree—”

  “No,” Alexander said loudly. “No.”

  “My dear Troy—”

  “Are you suggesting disbanding the choir to pay for the roof?”

  “As I said, I do hope it won’t come to that. Ah, there’s the bishop. He’s off to London today and I must catch him before he goes. Would you excuse me? Of course, I’ll let you know any developments—”

&nb
sp; Leo Beckford, arriving for choir practice five minutes later, found Alexander standing alone, like a great statue, ten feet inside the south door.

  “Are you all right?”

  “You keep asking me that—”

  “You don’t look all right—”

  “Would you?” Alexander said wildly. “Would you? If you had just been told that the Cathedral Choir of Aldminster, instituted by the first Anglican bishop of the city to sing masses for the soul of the king in 1535, was to be disbanded by the dean and chapter to pay for building repairs and offered instead to the city council?”

  Somehow, he got through assembly, an interview with a retired Aldminster manufacturer who generously wished to give the gymnasium a new all-purpose floor, a second interview with Roger Farrell, who ran the athletics and wished to make a formal complaint at the organist’s obstructiveness over allowing choristers any practice in the field, half an hour’s correspondence, a telephone call with the school auditor, and a period of Tacitus with the A-level Latin set, before he had time to face the dean’s announcement with any collectedness of mind. “Don’t worry,” Leo had said, “it’s only part of some old holy politicking. He can’t touch the choir. It’s here by royal charter. Quite safe.” And he had given Alexander what seemed in retrospect an almost condescending pat, and had gone off towards the north transept with an indecently light step.

  He was probably right. It needed an Act of Parliament to repeal a charter conferred by the Crown. But no royally given immunity could protect the choir from the subtle offloading and inevitable undermining that lay behind the dean’s bland proposal. The council take over the funding of the choir! The council take over, as it must if it were to dig into its pockets, a uniquely precious choral tradition of which it naturally had no understanding?

  “Coffee?” Sandra said in the doorway.

  He shook his head.

  “Nicholas is here, Headmaster. He says can he have a word and as you’re free until lunch I said I thought if he was quick—”

  She was looking sorry for him again and it made him want to hit her. In his view she did not have the capacity to understand his suffering, blurred as her mind was with romantic delusions and the desire to understand other people. With an effort he dredged up mentally a litany of her good qualities, smiled at her as broadly as he could, and said he’d be happy to see Nicholas. Nicholas was wearing jeans and a faded navy blue sweatshirt with “No Nuke” stencilled across the chest in white.

  “I’m sorry to be a bother, sir, but I feel I ought to move on and I don’t quite know what—”

  “Sit down,” Alexander said. “I’m afraid we’ve all rather forgotten about you. But you’ve been immensely useful. The games fields haven’t looked so good in years and all in time for Sports Day—”

  “It’s the least I could do. But I can’t go on really, like this, drifting. I’m getting a bit depressed and I know, I mean, I think I know, what I want to do.”

  “Good,” Alexander said heartily.

  “I want to go back into music.”

  “Do you? Excellent. In what way?”

  “Well, that’s the problem. I don’t really know who I ought to talk to—”

  “If you want to perform—”

  “Oh no,” Nicholas said, hurriedly, “I’m not good enough for that, not nearly good enough.”

  “Have you talked to Mr. Beckford?”

  “No. He’s so busy and I—”

  “Shall I have a word with him?”

  “Oh, would you?”

  “He has a lot of contacts in the city. He might come up with an idea. I expect you’re getting rather sick of the infirmary.”

  “Well, I am a bit.”

  The telephone rang. Sandra said, “Shall I come in and take him away now?”

  “Thank you.” He turned to Nicholas. “I’ll have to throw you out, I’m afraid. But I won’t forget.”

  In the common room after lunch, John Godwin, who was crippled and wise and had taught history at the King’s School for thirty years, patted the armchair beside him to indicate that Alexander should sit down.

  “I’m sorry to tell you, Headmaster, that I know why you are looking like that.”

  Alexander dropped heavily into the chair.

  “Bush telegraph already?”

  “No doubt one of the vergers was listening. Shocking old gossips, always have been—”

  Alexander looked round the crowded room.

  “General knowledge?”

  “I’m afraid so. Discussion level dropped on your entry.”

  Alexander sighed.

  “Can you give me some kind of advice? I imagine the Farrell brigade is behind the dean blowing whistles—”

  “It’ll die down when the first excitement is over and they realize that our greatest mark of universally recognized distinction vanishes with the choir. In any case, there’s a royal charter. I seem to remember hearing of a nineteenth-century dean trying to sell off the choir to augment his income and being baulked by the charter. Go and look it up. It’s in the archive office.”

  “Even so, I don’t like feeling that the common room isn’t behind me.”

  John Godwin smiled and picked up his walking stick preparatory to getting up.

  “Don’t lose a wink of sleep over that, Headmaster. When their bluff is called and it means siding with the school or the chapter, all this placard carrying will stop. Nothing like a threatened invasion to give a nation a dose of patriotism.” He levered himself up. “Farrell’s a good agitator, but he isn’t on the academic staff, after all. Go and look at the archives, and then read the charter out in assembly.”

  “Thank you, John,” Alexander said.

  “Don’t thank me, Headmaster. It’s a luxury to be listened to.”

  When he had gone, Alexander steeled himself and crossed the room to the group round Roger Farrell, who, in an immaculate tracksuit, was talking about the junior county athletic trials. Alexander made some anodyne opening remark and Farrell said, loudly, “We hear the school’s going to be dragged into the twentieth century, Headmaster. If you ask me, in the nick of time.”

  “All I ask of you, Farrell,” Alexander said in a burst of temper, “is a little professional loyalty. As well you know.”

  And then the whole room went silent, and he only managed to get himself through the door by a fraction of a second before he began to shake.

  It was the day for after-school choir practice. Leo would be up there in the practice room with twenty-four boys getting the descant right for evensong or whatever the problem of the moment was. The thought was of stupendous consolation. So, as ever, was the cathedral itself, mysterious in the late-afternoon light, impregnable, impersonal, yet offering sanctuary on every level. Alexander, in his gown ready for evensong, threaded his way among the remaining whispering tourists—he always caused a faint stir on account of the splendour of his appearance—and made for the door in the north transept leading up to the practice room.

  “Wooldridge” Leo was saying angrily.

  “Sorry, sir, sorry, I didn’t see the change of clef—”

  On the dim stair, Alexander waited. Ireland in F; notes falling as cool as glass drops.

  “Soft, soft, on ‘holy is His name …’ ”

  He laid his cheek against the cold ancient stone. The desire to weep was enormous. Saint Paul had known about music and God; join together, he had told the early Christians, join together singing and making melody to the Lord. Nothing was more powerful than music, more uniting, nothing lifted man in worship as music could, the voice of the trumpet calling out, “Come up hither, come up to Me.”

  “Can you make sure you get that F sharp?”

  Handel had written the Messiah because he wished to make men better; he had said so, quite simply. He had felt that he saw Heaven while he was writing the Hallelujah chorus. And what composer, commissioned by a secular city council whose preoccupations were so alien to such vision, could hope to write music such as that? Th
e spiritual importance of what he could hear from the room above broke over him in a wave. Salvation lay that way, the food for a man’s natural religious appetite.

  The last falling notes of the last Amen—

  “You’re tired,” Leo said, “all that cricket—”

  “We like it, sir.”

  “I like it too. I just don’t like it when it makes you too dozy, Ashworth, to remember to turn over the pages of your chant book.”

  Alexander opened the door. The choir straightened respectfully.

  “Off with you now and get ready. You’ve ten minutes at least.” He crossed the dusty room to the piano, where Leo sat, straight-backed in a battered corduroy jacket, his hands still on the keyboard.

  “I shouldn’t have brushed you off this morning,” Leo said. “You were quite right. It’s an awful prospect.”

  “We must talk about it. I’ve been down there on the stairs listening—”

  “We weren’t at our best tonight. Very ragged canticles.”

  “Leo, the privilege of this music, all it can do that nothing else can do—”

  “You don’t need to tell me.”

  “I’m going to fight every inch of the way.”

  “Me too. Do you realize I might become a council employee? Imagine trying to talk choral music at city hall.” He got up and began to stuff music haphazardly into his briefcase. “Look, I must go, I’m not dressed—”

  “I’ll walk down with you. I thought Martin was playing tonight.”

  “He is. I want to hear him. The ‘Nunc’ has got very dispirited and he was going to try something new out tonight.”

  “Leo, I want you to take Nicholas Elliott in for a while.”

  Leo paused, his briefcase open in his hand.

  “Lord, I’d clean forgotten about him, poor fellow. Is he still lurking in the infirmary?”

  “Yes. He thinks he wants to work in music.”

  “He’s got an excellent ear,” Leo said, snapping the briefcase shut, “and a good musical sense. If only he wasn’t so wet—”

  “He mightn’t be, if he had some real project in hand.”

  Leo grinned.

  “Like acting as a chaperon to me? Sure, I’ll take him in. He can muck me out. But it won’t make any difference, Alexander. If I could only meet Sally in the silent reading room of the public library, it wouldn’t make any difference.”