Her one aim was not to cheat on anybody if she could possibly help it, and of course she was cheating on Alan by every day she didn’t write her letter. It was only difficult to write because she didn’t quite know clearly, apart from leaving him, what she was going to do. Leo wanted her to marry him, but she thought she should get used to the idea of not being married to Alan before she thought seriously of marrying anyone else. She was wild about Leo, no doubt of that, and wilder still since he had taken her to bed in his lopsided bedroom in Chapter Yard and delighted her by making love to her rather than just having sex with her, which was what she was used to. To be investigated all over with immense approving interest was as seductive as having her opinions seriously considered. It gave her amazing confidence in herself.
“It’ll wear off,” she said to Leo, “it can’t last, this gigantic enthusiasm.”
“You forget that I really like your character. Be yourself and you’ll find you’re stuck with me. When will you learn? I want what you are, not what I wish you were. Except for married. I wish you weren’t married.”
She didn’t feel married. She felt very much Henry’s mother but not at all Alan’s wife. That was the prime thing she must write and say, and then she must say that it was another man who had, so to speak, given her back to herself. Alan wouldn’t have a clue what she meant, but she didn’t know how else to put it without sounding women’s-libbish, which wasn’t what she felt at all. Alan was likely to become very sentimental about Henry, but she had to steel herself for that and try to refrain from pointing out what a fair-weather father he had always been. She was going, she told herself, to be fair.
As to Frank, she was so furious with him over the choir, she was going to let him stew in ignorance over Alan. He hadn’t come to tell her, face to face and honestly, about his deal with the dean over the choir and the headmaster’s house, he had just left her to find out by rumour, and so she had stormed down to the flat in Back Street and confronted him.
“And where does your loyalty lie,” she had shouted, “with your grandson or your politics, I’d like to know! You’re not just a cheat but a coward too. You left Henry and me to discover this as best we might. No wonder you haven’t been to Blakeney Street in weeks! Well, this is where we part company, Frank, Henry or no Henry. What do you think it’s like for him to have a grandfather, a public figure, acting like this and trying to get rid of the very body his grandson has just been chosen to join? And all behind our backs!”
A tide of ancient chauvinism rose redly in Frank; his father would have hit his mother if she had spoken to him in such a way. He held his door open for Sally.
“Get out,” he said, “get out before I throw you out.”
They hadn’t spoken since. Henry said once or twice, “Is Grandpa coming?” and Sally had said, absently, to try and indicate that there was nothing significant in his not coming, “He’s up to his ears in work just now. You know what he’s like.” He didn’t go to the cathedral to see Henry enrolled as a full chorister, but if Henry noticed, he made no comment; he was used, after all, to not having a full parental complement in attendance anyway.
Leo said Sally might be misjudging Frank.
“You don’t know what the dean’s like, Sal. Frank may well have found himself in a far more entrenched position than he meant, and because he isn’t used to being outmanoeuvred he doesn’t know how to recover himself. He’s made a mistake and pride won’t let him say so. I rather admire him. He’s the last of the old city fathers, in essence.”
But Frank was Alan’s father, and in her present frame of mind, Sally did not want to make things up with him. She would tell him when she judged the moment right, just as she would tell Henry. Henry must know nothing until Sally could tell him exactly what was going to happen.
One thing she did feel very bad about, and that was the friendship between Leo and Alexander Troy. They were so angry with each other over Sally that they were scarcely speaking, and this at a time when they needed to speak, because of the choir. Sally had thought of either going away for a while or not seeing Leo but neither idea was really practicable, and in any case Leo had declared often to Alexander that he wouldn’t give up his pursuit of Sally, wherever she was. She liked Alexander so much, and so did Henry, and she wished very hard for Felicity to come home so that he would have someone to confide in. She once suggested to Leo that she should go and see Alexander and try and sort things out, but she chose a poor moment, a moment when Leo was absorbed in thinking about work, and he turned on her the impersonal gaze of an absolute stranger and said there was no point in going, no point at all.
She had so much energy these days, felt so certain of herself, that she thought she could do anything. She cleaned the house throughout, even behind things, and cooked quite complicated food for her and Henry’s suppers, to which his only reaction was to say with mild reproach that he hoped they’d be able to have spaghetti again soon. She took him swimming after school, and went to watch him and Chilworth practise in the nets, and offered herself for spells of duty in the school second-hand shop, which was run by just the committee-minded kind of mother she most disliked. On Thursday afternoons, when the bookshop shut, and late most evenings she saw Leo, and he would sit in the downstairs room with his lap overflowing with Mozart, who approved of him possessively, while they talked and drank wine and he played the piano for her. Only once did Henry come down, in a midnight panic about some French prep he hadn’t done, and although he seemed mildly surprised to see Leo, his surprise was overtaken by relief that Leo seemed prepared to test him on his vocabulary, there and then, even if it was twenty past twelve.
“And now you can sleep with a quiet mind. Quest-ce que c’est to sleep en Frog?”
“Dormir.”
“And to sleep well?”
“Dormir bien.”
“Right, then. Nightmare over. Are you going to take this fat fur character upstairs with you?”
Henry gathered Mozart up.
“Thanks, sir.”
“Sleep well. I’ll see you eight-thirty tomorrow sharp in very fine voice.”
Henry grinned. In the morning he said, “Why’d Mr. Beckford come?”
“To talk to me.”
“About me?”
“No, old vanity pots. Just conversation. Friendly conversation.”
“Is he a friend?”
“Yes. A very good one.”
Henry squirmed.
“It’s a bit funny to be friends with a master—”
“Oh? Aren’t masters allowed to be people too? Anyway he isn’t a master.”
“He’s like one,” Henry said and then added, “He’s OK, though.”
“Gracious of you.”
Henry had a letter from Alan that morning, the first to him alone for over three months. He seemed oddly indifferent to it, didn’t want to open it, and when Sally slit the envelope and handed it to him, he looked at the first line or two and said rather vaguely that he’d read it later. When he came downstairs after brushing his teeth, ready for choir practice, he tore off a corner of the envelope to take the Saudi stamps to Hooper. Sally said, “Go on, take the letter to read in break,” but she found it later on the little table in the hall, which they both used as a kind of pending tray. She read it. It was a breezy account of camel racing and said at the end, “Take care of Mum, old son, and I’ll see you in the holidays.” August, he meant. Six weeks away. In six weeks she must have made up her mind, told him, told Henry, and told Frank. It was the first chill draught of reality. She went back into the downstairs room to make another cup of coffee and to review her state of mind, and found Mozart on the table contentedly eating the butter.
The Aldminster Echo reporter arriving at the council chambers to interview Frank Ashworth about the city’s interesting intention to take over the twenty-four singing boys of the cathedral choir was told that unfortunately Mr. Ashworth couldn’t see him after all. He was quite used to being told this kind of thing and grinned c
heerfully and said he’d wait. Frank’s secretary said she hadn’t made herself clear, obviously, Mr. Ashworth had no interview to give the Echo, and that was final.
The reporter made a note of this and said could he suppose that the proposal had been thrown out, and the secretary, typing away and not looking up, said she hadn’t the first idea. “Very interesting,” the reporter said annoyingly and then he said, “Keep cheerful, darlin’,” and went down to the Lamb and Flag three doors away, where council gossip was given away free with pints of Protheroe’s real ale. He knew several of the regulars in there and in half an hour had elicited the information he sought, that Frank’s proposal that the city should adopt the choir had been thrown out resoundingly.
It had been the worst council meeting Frank could remember. Three of the younger members—including the one who wanted grief leave awarded to gays and lesbians in council employ who lost their lovers—had actually jeered at Frank, laughing at him with open-mouthed incredulity, in a way he found unbearably insolent. The general opinion was that the cathedral choir was outdated, elitist, and irrelevant to a modern world that did not need superstitious props like religion any longer. The gay supporter then pointed out with smiling malice that Frank had a grandson in the choir and therefore his proposal was blatantly nepotistic. The education officer, whose ineffectuality in the teachers’ strike Frank had exposed, said with some satisfaction he thought fifty thousand pounds was on the steep side for Frank to suggest as a family favour.
To be gibed at was one thing; to be gibed at cheaply and ignorantly in public in this chamber, which Frank held in more respectful awe than any other room in his life, was intolerable. He had entered it first as a junior councillor just before his thirtieth birthday, and its weighty magnificence of red mahogany soberly gilded here and there with the city and county arms, the memorials to the fallen of two wars, the lettered “1888” above the great clock to date the building itself, had impressed upon him the size and the honour of his responsibility to Aldminster. In thirty years, of course, he had seen rows and heard abuse around that immense horseshoe-shaped table or from the banked seats on either side, but he had seldom, except in the last five years, seen the council lose its sense of decorum. Proclaiming themselves progressives, people had invaded the council merely to abuse, in Frank’s view, their power there, to advance minority obsessions that did nothing to promote the greater good of the greatest number of people in Aldminster. Frank had come to realize with dull horror that many of them actually despised the poor and ordinary they had been elected to defend. And debate had become personal. Frank was ashamed to listen to some of the unprofessional squabbling that now masqueraded as public discussion, and now here he was in the pillory himself, at his accustomed seat halfway down one leg of the horseshoe, being accused, with grinning sneers, of attempting to line his own pocket and advance his grandson’s career.
He could not even make a clean breast of it, and declare that he had allowed the dean to make assumptions about the future of the choir, had allowed the dean to extract his own acquiescence to those assumptions, because he was so eager to break into the charmed circle of the close by buying the headmaster’s house. He had admitted to himself that the headmaster’s house would be a kind of fifth column for the council in the close, but he was not going to admit that in the chamber now, to an audience sniffing for the underhand like rats among garbage. And yet if he did not admit it, the deduction would be made that he was somehow in cahoots with the dean; indeed that charge was already being levelled at him by a handsome young woman in a scarlet shirt, who was saying loudly from the benches that a man who was happy to entertain Hugh Cavendish in his own home was the kind of two-faced socialist the party could well do without. She had black hair and a bold, rude face and a party of devotees in the chamber roared with approval for her. Frank tried to say something about the city’s heritage inherent in the choir, and she rose to her feet and shouted that “tradition” was a dirty word because it meant no more than the preservation of social inequalities, of which the choir was just one disgusting example. She said “disgusting” several times over, and it was then that Frank, who had always claimed walking out of a meeting was self-defeating, rose slowly and heavily to his feet and walked to the door. As he shut it behind him, someone said, overexcitedly, “There goes the last of the mastodons,” and there was a burst of laughter.
He could have wept. Not for the insult but because of the depths to which the council could plunge, had plunged. It was not only not a great institution anymore, it was hardly an institution at all, presiding incoherently over a city in which too often the young went untaught and the sick un-nursed. He went into his office and stared at his blank blotter and knew himself to be, temporarily at least, both discouraged and bitter. Worst of all, he felt deeply disappointed in himself.
His secretary, a tired, experienced woman who had worked for councils of all political colours over the years, and whom he shared with another senior councillor, came in and asked, would he like coffee?
“No thanks.”
She didn’t ask how the meeting had gone; she never did. Frank had never seen her interest roused by anything at all except the January sales, when she always wanted inconvenient amounts of time off, and royal weddings. She put two buff files away in the steel cabinet beside Frank’s desk and then said surprisingly, “Why don’t you go up to the school, then, and see your grandson. They’re free around lunch, aren’t they?” and went out. When he passed her three minutes later she was typing as usual and she said, without stopping, “I’ll deal with the chap from the Echo.”
“Thanks,” Frank said.
He was puzzled and annoyed to find he would like to have dropped in at Blakeney Street. Heaven knows why, or what he’d say when he got there, and Sally would be at work now in any case. He even walked past the house and noticed that there was a big jar of iris in the front window, with Mozart beside it, keeping an eye on the street, and that the knocker shaped like a dolphin that Sally and Alan had brought back from their Maltese honeymoon, and which he had always told them would get nicked, was spectacularly well polished. On an impulse he wrote, “1:15. Just passing. Frank” on a paying-in slip at the back of his cheque book, and tore it out and folded it up and pushed it through the letter box. Mozart left his windowsill at once to investigate.
He walked on, zigzagging up the streets to the edge of the close, soothing himself with the familiarity of buildings and railings and prospects down alleys. It was cool and grey and still, and all the wine-and-sandwich bars were full and the doors of pubs were open to the pavement, belching beery gusts out into the street. The close was quite full too, with people asleep on the grass or eating out of bags and packets, with knots of teenagers smoking here and there and dogs and toddlers and people on benches reading newspapers trying not to sit too close to each other. The grass was spattered with litter, and the bins were overflowing. The cathedral rose out of it all with a truly superb indifference.
Frank crossed the close by the path that ran directly under the great west window and led on to the Victorian Gothic bulk of the main building of the King’s School. It passed, on its way, the headmaster’s house, at which Frank glanced only briefly, and then stopped at the stone gateway that opened into the school’s impressive courtyard. It was empty, but the windows of the refectory that formed one side were open, releasing a terrific clatter of knives and forks and a blast of institutional cookery. Frank intercepted a boy running towards it and asked where the junior school had lunch.
“Oh, they’ve had it,” the boy said, breathless and eager to push on. “They’re out on the fields now. They eat at twelve-thirty.”
The school playing fields sloped slightly down from the close, away from the city and the estuary. When first laid out, they had been planted with beech and horse chestnut trees and bordered with fields that stretched eastwards to the then village of Horsley. Now houses and low factories and shopping precincts covered the fields, and cricket and
football were played against a backdrop of brick. The trees still stood magnificently, and under one particularly tremendous horse chestnut, Henry and half a dozen others were practising back flips.
“Should you be doing that straight after your dinner?” Frank said.
Henry came across to him with unselfconscious pleasure and said, “We didn’t eat it, it was hamburger, awful—”
Another boy said importantly, “My mother says it’s all soya anyway.”
“Supposed to taste the same.”
“Well, it doesn’t and we just flick it about—”
“Care for a short walk?” Frank said to Henry.
Henry beamed.
“OK.”
They moved away down the slope.
“Sorry I haven’t been to see you and your mother lately.”
“She said you were busy.”
“Well, that’s always true. But we had a bit of a barney, your mother and me, about the choir. Did she say anything to you?”
Henry stooped for a stick.
“No.”
“What do you feel about the choir? Do you think it’s important?”
Henry swished his stick from side to side like a windscreen wiper.
“Course I do.”
“Why?”
Henry shrugged.
“Because—of the cathedral. And the music. And—and because of God.”
“Do you believe in God?” Frank said.
“Yes.”
“Why do you?”
Henry sighed. This was an awful sort of conversation and not a bit like Frank was usually.
“It’s obvious,” Henry said and his voice had an edge of contempt. “There wouldn’t be any of this”—he waved his stick—“without God, and the cathedral wouldn’t be there in the first place.”
“What about,” Frank said, noticing the contempt and changing tack, “the boys from the state schools in the city who can’t get into the choir like you can?”
Henry gave him a clear glance.
The Choir Page 14
