by James Wood
“Please forgive me. It’s been one of those days. Oh Christ, the bloody time, it’s three, how can you bear to even look at me? Sorry sorry.”
“Roger, calm down. I’ve been having a perfectly happy time here working my way through your bookshelves.”
“Wasn’t it Max who once pointed at your bookshelves, Tom, and declaimed, ‘Thomas, these are your real friends!’ I think it was.”
“Yes indeed. I often think the equivalent about you when I watch your choir.”
“Ha! Speaking of which, why don’t we call it a day and go and hear the choir sing Evensong at Westminster?”
The choir certainly make a pretty sound; we’ve been before. And I had not yet had a chance to mention Jane to Roger. So we crossed London again, heading for Westminster, Roger talking the entire time. Cathedrals in big cities confuse me; I am used to Durham, to the climb up a quiet cobbled street crowded with buildings, and then the cathedral in front of you, and the great shock of the open space around the building. But Westminster Abbey exists amid the proud circular business of Parliament Square. The contrast was with the cool darkness inside, which seemed a perpetual dawn. Sitting in the unfulfilled shadow, with Roger whispering about “the terrible acoustics,” I enjoyed resembling a penitent while my head was thriving with secret blasphemies. And here suddenly were the canons and archdeacons processing up the nave, one behind the other. As they moved past, the fluttering hems of their cassocks condescended to the stone of the cathedral floor. They dropped their heads with loud modesty; they were “setting” their faces, I thought. At Durham, pious Canon Percy, an old friend of my father’s, used to hold his hands in front of him, pressed together and made to point forward like an obedient fish. When he turned left to go into his carved stall, Canon Percy bent the fish of his hands left, too.
Behind the priests walked the choir of the Abbey-the little boys first, and then the grown men, the whole group resembling a pious growth-chart which had blushingly omitted adolescence. From innocence to experience, without any botched transition. Then the precentor began to intone: “O Lord, make clean our hearts within us.” During the service, they sang Psalm 123, not one of my favourites. “Have mercy upon us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we are utterly despised.” I enjoyed the correspondence of so many different voices and types: a sickly bass, who sucked clicking lozenges during the prayers; a pompous alto, who sang in an angry flutter and who, possibly to contradict the effeminacy of his occupation, had grown an adventurous beard; a young tenor, handsome except for his long neck and enormous Adam’s apple: it was hard not to watch its wooden struggles, which lent him the effect of a man trying to swallow a large peg. The boys stood in front of the men. I awarded them personalities: the saint, the bully, the early masturbator, the blond one whose mother envied his looks, the one who couldn’t sing, the weakling whose parents visited his school each weekend, bringing underpants and fruitcake. And conducting them was the Master of Choristers, a delicate-looking fellow who was no doubt secretly laughed at by the boys for his determination, during rehearsals, to pronounce “ensemble” with a French accent.
Of course, it was hard to hear any music, because Roger maintained a racing commentary throughout the service. Whenever the boys strained for a high note, Roger winced and theatrically whistled through his teeth. He rattled the service sheet and jabbed at it with his finger.
“Why do these choirs do all this Victorian drivel? It’s shameful nonsense,” he said, into my left ear. “We have a great English heritage from the Tudor and Elizabethan period just sitting there—just sitting there!—and these choirmasters roll out Harold Darke and Herbert Howells and Wesley and Sumsion and Balfour Gardiner, though I will say that the famous Balfour Gardiner chord—the famous diminished seventh, or perhaps infamous diminished seventh—well, that’s a pretty marvellous chord. That one chord—that one chord—is worth more than the whole of Hitler’s career.”
Hitler, of course, was not Hitler, but the famous and disliked conductor with whom Roger was obsessed.
“Roger,” I whispered, “what on earth are you talking about? Sumsion? Darke?”
“You see that’s my point, that is my point! Their very names denote their mediocrity. They are English church composers from the beginning of the century. A term I dislike massively. Church composer! No such thing. They’re no bloody good at all. And meanwhile, Tallis, Byrd, Gibbons, Purcell are ignored—in favour of Naylor’s Vox Dicentis.”
“Well, hang on”—it was useless to hope for silence from Roger—“you’re no one to talk about names. All your music friends, I mean the professional ones, the ones who are in the public eye and always on the radio, seem to have been named by some kind of marketing committee of the English Tourist Board.”
“Not me.”
“Well, Roger Trelawnay is pretty English. And how about all those ‘authentic instruments’ people? Ralph Barley, and Christopher Robinson, and Jeremy Darbyshire, and that weird continuo player, Simon Peacock, or whatever his name is.”
“Steven Peacock.”
“Well, you get my point. These guys seem to have been named in order to make a point about English authenticity! Don’t they all play things like the sackbut and the hautboy and the lute? At least four of them were playing at our wedding. I’m waiting for the day when you make a record with someone called Adam Albion on viola. Just to be done with it.”
In the corner of my eye, I saw a pale old verger approach us. He walked evenly down the aisle, as if on velvet wheels, and stopped at our pew. Curiously, he said nothing, but merely stood watching us, perhaps with the ambition of looking menacing. Then he gently wheeled off.
“Have you got the message?” whispered Roger.
“I think it was aimed at you, you’re the one who’s doing all the talking.”
As the service ended, and the choir began to process, the organ sounded—beautiful, that silver dapple of complicated breath through a thousand mouths. At the close of his piece, the organist slowed down as the final cadence approached. It seems sometimes, doesn’t it, that organists enjoy holding on to the moment of portended resolution just before the final major chord. And then, finally, came the last chord, more satisfying even than its dragged prophecy had suggested. One, two, three, four, five seconds, and still the organist kept his fingers and feet pressed down, as if he had died on the job. The building was filled with sound—the mineral jangling of the small pipes, and the dragonish gargle of the large ones. And after the chord had finished, there was a ghostly echo in the building, one, two, three, four, five seconds—the memory of the chord equal in body to the actual event.
Roger and I stayed sitting while the building emptied. I sensed my moment, my opening.
“Those musicians at our wedding … It wasn’t so long ago, the wedding, but it feels as if it was in another era,” I said, leadingly.
“Hmm. Our choir wasn’t in its best voice that day.”
“Well, that might be said of all of us,” I said, again with deliberate wistfulness.
“Yeah, but I mean it. Our best baritone wasn’t there, and Mandy Sullivan, you know, our largeish soprano, brilliant voice, huge breasts, had a nasty cold and was singing at about sixty percent capacity.”
“It was a funny day. Very happy. Everything seemed possible then—I mean between Jane and me. Everything seemed rosy. Even the Ph.D.”
“We mangled the Tallis at your wedding. O nata lux. With Mandy below par we just couldn’t do it justice. What an anthem, though! My god, what an anthem. It’s a curious fact that between Purcell and Elgar, a period of more than two centuries, English music produced nothing of the slightest quality. Nothing. That’s why I object to these choirs singing Sumsion and Darke. It all went wrong at the Reformation, if you ask me. All went wrong in 1536, when Hugh Latimer removed all the feast days from the ritual year. No more St. Anne’s Day, no more St. Cuthbert’s, St. Swithin’s, Holy Cross Day, etcetera. Decimated the Sarum Calendar.”
It seemed impossible to pers
uade Roger into the hospitality of dialogue. He was lost in music, which had also claimed Jane at times. My only hope was to be brutally direct.
“Roger, why do you think that Jane persists in ignoring me? Look, she had every right to abandon me last Christmas. I don’t know what she told you, but she had every right. We had a fierce argument, secrets were betrayed, and she felt that she’d had enough. But that was a long time ago now. Getting on for a year ago. And I thought that in May, I thought that when my own father died, sheer human decency might … Well, as you may know, at the funeral she said that if I really proved to her that I had reformed, she would have me back. She said we should meet every so often for lunch and so on, and I would prove to her that I was a changed man. Those were her words. But she never sees me, so how can I prove to her that I am reformed? Do I have to go round and break into her fucking flat?”
“Well, getting all angry about it won’t help,” said Roger peacefully, through his hectic dentition.
“Angry?”
“Yes, angry. Give it time. Jane’s got a big concert coming up, her biggest, actually. Wigmore Hall. She must be tiptop for that. She’s doing the bloody Hammerklavier! Now, that one’s not for the fainthearted, dear me no. Not for the emotionally distracted. What you can do for her is give her a bit of space, so she can really prepare for it, that’s all.”
Roger, incorrigibly unmarried, made our lapsed marriage sound like something that Nicholson, who is Jane’s agent, might draw up—a legal form, apportioning hours for visiting and piano playing and so on. I realized that Roger was the worst person to consult on these matters. He had lived alone for years in his icy flat in Camden, dominated by a grand piano and a harpsichord. These vast wings of polished wood made all nonmusical movement difficult. Roger was almost entirely undomesticated; though who am I to talk?
“Look, Tom, I’m having a music party—you remember the old music evenings I used to have—in a week’s time. I’ve invited everyone, including Jane. And Max will come, too, and that totally unmusical girlfriend of his, Fiona.”
“Oh yes, Fiona Raymond. Jane and I met her first in Sundershall last Christmas. Actually we met her the day before Jane and I had our tremendous argument and she went running off back to London. Haven’t seen much of Fiona lately. Nor of Max, either.”
“Yep, totally unmusical. Now, I wasn’t thinking of it in these terms, but why don’t you come along and put your toe in the waters, as it were? If you can’t get to see Jane the normal way, then ambush her. I promise to tell her at the last possible moment that you are coming.”
Roger was trying to be helpful, in his way, and I accepted his kindness. We parted outside, at the great door of the Abbey. He had somewhere to be, and was already half an hour late. I had nowhere to be, and stood for several minutes smoking a cigarette and watching the traffic in Parliament Square. From behind me, through the high door, two files of little choirboys, dressed in black capes and wearing black mortarboards with purple tassels, emerged and crocodiled past, on their way back to school. They looked indistinguishable from the black-caped choirboys at Durham. Whenever I went home I used to go to hear the choir sing, and I always thought there was something horrible yet almost funny in watching those cheerful little boys singing words of such ungraspable maturity, about David going up to his chamber and weeping after the slaying of Absalom, or the beautiful words from Revelation, my favourite in the Bible: “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.” But it was hard not to complain, too, when the boys at Westminster Abbey sang those words from Psalm 123, “Have mercy upon us, have mercy upon us: for we are utterly despised.” Were they despised? Twenty minutes later, the same children might be kicking a football around in the schoolyard, or arguing like refugees over a five-pence piece. I remember leaving the cathedral at Durham once, and coming upon a group of six choristers, juniors in jackets and regulation short trousers. They were surrounding a boy, whose outstretched hand they seemed to be holding. A fight, I thought. But they were counting his money. “It’s twenty-four pence,” said one. Another said gravely, “It’s not enough. But we can go window-shopping.” I couldn’t help smiling as the little group set off for town, with twenty-four pence in hand, probably breaking school rules, walking and running, the backs of their jackets swaying naively, their step made particular by the uneven cobbles in the Cathedral Close.
Are we utterly despised? I don’t feel at all despised. Do we need to beg for mercy? But what sins have those little boys committed? Whose hearts are unclean? Not mine, certainly not my late father’s parishioners’. In Sundershall, when Father was alive, the old ladies of the village knelt on their dry knees and confessed their sins. Muriel Spedding in her dead shoes, and shyly intransigent Susan Perez-Temple, and Miss Ogilvie with her three canes. And they were joined by Terry Upsher, whose capless head was covered in thin, immature hair. Sometimes I sat behind him, and his strong neck seemed to be giving off a confused pulse. And I remember Terry’s father: dourly old Mr. Upsher sat and loudly he used to speak, because of his deafness; his smoker’s voice—his miner’s voice—came out in a burned croak, as if a scar were speaking. In the Nicene Creed he pronounced “apostolic” with a curious heavy stress on the second syllable rather than the third, and threw everyone out of step, like a lame pallbearer. It was easy to do this because there were so few worshippers …
Now, I ask you, what sins have these people committed? What sins? They kneel and intone their confessions—“we have sinned through ignorance, through weakness, through our own deliberate fault”—but what has any of them done in the week since last Sunday’s cringing absolution? A snobbery here, malice there, blowing the car horn at a slow tourist in the next village, a fold of desire, an argument with the sister about how long she could come to stay, a furtive refusal to shut the door properly of the local shop because of something said by the shopkeeper four years ago. But all this is no more than the daily seed of life, blown all over the land from human to human. This is the bread of life, this unimportant failure to be perfect. I remember exactly when the strange thought first occurred to me that if these people did not believe in this God they would not be asking Him to forgive them in the first place. I was thirteen. Nothing was the same again. An extraordinary liberation, frightening at first—and then not frightening at all, because whether I decided God existed or not I still left the church and ate Sunday lunch (beef, pork, lamb) and watched the rain fall in the garden.
Most people are not happy, after all, I decided. I was happy, I am happy, but in the largest scheme my small single happiness is quite unimportant. No, underneath each soul is a bowl of tears, whose level rises and rises in a lifetime. In some cases, the bowl does not overflow, so that you hardly know it is there. Others are swamped by grief. But you can’t say that anyone is really happy. If anyone is, then the sensation is fleeting, and sparkles away. How much stronger, more distinct, more lasting, is the sensation of unhappiness.
14
I DON’T THINK QUITE AS FEVERISHLY NOW, of course. Those teenage years were a terrible time of self-absorption. That period in my life was akin to the moment when one is passing low over land in a plane, and the sun is shining, and every so often a roof or a car or a lake glints sharply, and it is hard not to think that they are glinting because you are passing over them, that you are making them glint and that they are glinting at you. Of course, your passage is having not the slightest effect, is it? In my adolescence the most arbitrary occurrences seemed to conceal secret messages, meant only for me. And my thinking about God was like this.
One day, in my teens, I did try to talk to my father about these matters, about sin and pain. As ever, Peter was evasive, cheerful.
“Surely,” I said “original sin is just … just an unfair idea? All those nasty threats about how the wages of sin are death.”
“Yes, it is unfair, Tommy, and som
ewhere Augustine grinds on about how each child inherits the sin of his parents’ copulation. How’s that for unfair?” I instantly knew that “unfair” was the wrong word, a schoolboy word, and that Father would worry it to gentle oblivion.
“But why are you agreeing with me?” I asked anxiously.
“Well, original sin is no more unfair than anything else, is it? Inheritance cannot be fair. It’s rather unfair that I inherited my grandfather’s baldness and my father’s high blood pressure. It’s unfair that I might die tomorrow, or that I was born at all. But this doesn’t make it untrue.”
“But why,” I persisted, feeling myself lost—it was exactly like sports at school, as the athletes began to lap me on the racetrack—“why should anything be unfair, if God made the world? He’s love, you always say. Love isn’t unfair, is it?”
“Oh dear. You are melancholy at the moment. ‘Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy,’ eh? Why should anything exist at all? Don’t tell me you don’t want to exist, Tommy! Or are you sitting up there in that locked bedroom of yours reading Mr. Beckett?”
Peter turned somewhat to my mother, and said, brightly, “Actually, the wages of sin are death, and I can illustrate this quite well. I came across this the other day. About six centuries ago, in Durham, some of the noblemen wanted to kill the bishop, who had become difficult. So they hired two thugs, real sons of Belial, to do the deed. And do you know what the payment was for these two murderers? They got to keep the fine clothes of the dead bishop! It struck me that this is a literal example of how in their case the wages of sin really were death. These chaps were paid by the corpse! I might use that sometime.” He laughed and gently patted my hand. I looked away.
