The Choir (13 page)

“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? The 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.”

“Leo, I do beg you to think again. It can only lead to the most awful unhappiness all round, particularly for that boy.”

“Just mind your own business,” Leo said rudely, “would you?”

And then he brushed past Alexander and banged out of the door, leaving the golden dust motes whirling agitatedly in the air behind him.

The headmaster’s stall in the choir had often afforded Alexander refuge, as no doubt it had also done to all his predecessors over almost five hundred years. It gave him a marvellous view of the organ and with it a sense of the music rising over him like some tidal wave. The choristers directly ahead were always, at the beginnings of services, deeply conscious of him, but in the singing they forgot him and he could watch them with the admiration and affection they always inspired in him. There was such dignity in their absorption; it struck him every time. “They love it,” Leo had often said, “they love singing.” Three years ago, with the reluctant sanction of the dean and chapter, Alexander had given the choir Christmas off because he had felt that they should be with their families for once, and they had, the following year, pleaded to be allowed to stay. It struck him often that they liked being expected to achieve adult standards of behaviour, just as their profound enthusiasm for their music was as natural to them as breathing. “Miraculous,” a newspaper had called their dedication; they themselves considered it normal.

The archdeacon, peering through pebble lenses like an old badger, came in to the chancel to take the service. Summer evensong never had quite the magic of winter evensong, when only the lamps in the choir stalls were lit, and the voices went soaring out into the
vast dark quiet of the cathedral, but it was an unearthly time all the same. Alexander rose. The boys and the lay clerks waited before him, white and blue against the dark screen below the organ pipes, the third boy from the left Henry Ashworth, whose mother was having an affair with his choirmaster and organist. If it wasn’t for the music, where, Alexander wondered, could a boy like Henry turn, and yet, weirdly enough, if Henry were to discover about Leo, would not the music continue, strangely, to unite them? Unconsciously, in the intensity of his feeling, Alexander pounded his fist into his open palm and received a glare of the most stern reproof from the pebble lenses.

“If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

They knelt.

“I wish,” Alexander prayed, “that I did not take everything so violently to heart. I wish I had dispassion. I wish I had coolness of judgement, and reserve. But as I seem to have none of those things by nature, and have failed dismally to acquire them in half a century of life, please help me to use all the uncontrollable energies I have instead to save this choir for this cathedral, because once it is gone, a terrible poverty will afflict the people that can never be assuaged by any other means. And while You are at it, please find Felicity and send her home, because I am stronger when she is by me and I need to be strong. And do something to save Henry Ashworth from being the innocent victim of a human muddle. I’m sorry about this list of wants when I am here to glorify You, but tonight the wants are uppermost in my mind and as You know better than anyone, I am always at the mercy of what is uppermost in my mind.”

He opened his eyes and rose with the others to his feet. Psalm Sixty-one. The choir was poised, calm and ready.

“From the ends of the earth I call to you, when my heart faints: O set me on a rock that is higher than I.”

Alexander, shaking his head like a dog getting water out of its ears, grasped his service book with resolution. From his rock, he would defy every last one of them.

T
HE COUNTY ARCHIVIST, A GRAVE YOUNGISH WOMAN WITH A SWEET
smile and huge tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles, put a black japanned box down on the table in front of Alexander.

“I’m sorry to be so long, but even though you rang in advance, I hate taking documents like this out of the safe before I have to.”

The county records office was housed in a long temporary-looking building behind Aldminster Brewery and hardly looked substantial enough to contain anything as solid as a safe. The room they were in reminded Alexander of the “hut” classrooms that had been put up at the King’s School when the numbers had begun to grow on his arrival.