The Choir (26 page)

She got up from the floor and went over to the sink and ran cold water into her cupped hands to splash on to her face. Then she tore yards off a roll of paper towel and dried her face and blew her
nose; her skin felt as if it were several sizes too small. One of Henry’s jerseys lay on a rush-seated chair by the table. She picked it up and held it against her as she went up the stairs and then, repulsed by her own sentimentality, folded it with rigorous precision and put it away in his cupboard. She had hardly finished making up her face when the front door banged thunderously and Henry was stampeding into the big room shouting, “Mum, Mum, it was
brill
—”

She went down to him. He was wildly excited.

“He said empty your pockets and I said why, and he said otherwise you’ll jangle and I had to take my watch off and I coughed by mistake in the Ave waiting for my note and the tuning suddenly went adrift and I had to do a million re-takes and they built me this sort of tower, I’m
miles
high, and Mr. Beckford had to play the organ so I couldn’t see him and the mike cost five thousand pounds Mike said. It was
fantastic
.”

She made him scrambled eggs, and Mozart, reassured by Henry’s return that there would be no more unpleasant emotional displays, came back in and cried for milk.

“Can’t wait till tomorrow,” Henry said, “it was so superb.”

“You mustn’t get too excited. It might not sell at all, you know, it’s a tiny company, hardly anybody knows about it.”

“But it’ll be in the cathedral shop,” Henry said, “and Ianthe’s going to take my photo for the cover and then do a mad drawing all round it—”

“In your ruff?”

“No, casuals.” He looked longing. “She said had I got a baseball jacket.” “And?”

“
Couldn’t
I?”

“But they’re so awful—”

“They’re
brilliant.
”

“Shall we talk about it tomorrow, when you’re less over-the- moon and I’ve adjusted my prejudices?”

He grinned.

“You sound like Mr. Troy. He came in to watch us. He said I was great.”

She got up and picked up his plate.

“Mozart and I think you’re a bighead.”

He was delighted. He went capering upstairs doo-dahing loudly to himself, and then she heard the taps being turned on full blast and through the rush of water the eerie, haunting notes of the shepherd boy’s song from Auvergne.

He fell plumb from the summit of excitement into oblivion. She sat on the edge of his bed until he slept, then she went downstairs, and because he had made her feel so much more normal, she dialled Leo’s number. A girl answered.

“Could I speak to Leo?”

“Sorry,” Ianthe said, “he’s not here. He was, but he’s gone off again—”

“It’s Sally Ashworth—”

“Hi!” Ianthe said with warmth. “Henry tell you how it went? It was really great—”

Sally said untruthfully, “That’s why I rang.”

“Henry’s such a performer. I mean, Mike doesn’t usually say much, but he’s mad on Henry. He and Leo’ve gone to the pub. I’ll say you rang.”

“No,” Sally said, “don’t bother. I just wanted to know if you were all as excited as Henry is.”

“You bet.”

“Night,” Sally said.

She put the telephone down with immense care to compensate it for earlier manhandling. She was so exhausted she couldn’t bring herself to do all the tidying, preparing things she usually did at night. She pulled herself upstairs by the bannisters, tread by tread, washed with a clumsy staggeringness, and fell into bed. She lay there for a few minutes, almost stunned. Then she dragged herself up again, crossed unsteadily to the mantelpiece, tugged off her wedding ring and dropped it into the Chinese jar where hair-grips and stray buttons and safety pins from the dry cleaners seemed to accumulate. She stood for a moment, head bowed, and then she turned and toppled back into bed to sleep as if she had been felled.

“I should have rung,” Frank Ashworth said, “but I found myself in the close, so I thought I’d drop by.”

Felicity, holding the front door half open between them, regarded him without welcome.

“Is your husband in?”

“He’s just come over from the school, as a matter of fact.”

Frank peered at her. She had bare feet and was wearing the kind of skirt he associated with gypsy fortune-tellers, who used to come with the travelling fairs to Horsley Common when he was a boy. The common was a housing estate now with silly street names like Primrose Way and Cowslip Close.

“Could I see him for five minutes?”

Alexander came out of the sitting room, saying he thought he had heard the doorbell.

“Mr. Ashworth—”

“I wonder if I might have five minutes—”

“Of course,” Alexander said. His voice was matter-of-fact.

Frank stepped in saying, “It concerns Mrs. Troy too, so if you’d join us—”

The sitting-room floor was spread with new curtains for their bedroom that Felicity had suddenly decided to make as a hostage to fortune against their having to leave the house. Almost the entire room was covered with rough cream Indian cotton that gave off a strong smell of sunburned grass. She made no reference at all to this, so the three of them took chairs twelve feet from one another around the edge and Frank felt himself disadvantaged. Alexander appeared to notice nothing; both he and Felicity sat and watched their visitor.

“I believe a valuation has recently been carried out on this house,” Frank said.

Alexander nodded.

“I expect you know that it has long been my wish to provide the people of the city, the ordinary people, with somewhere of their own in the close—”

Alexander burst in. “The principle of course—”

“Sh,” Felicity said.

Frank turned his head slowly from one to another. He looked tired beyond measure.

“My wish hasn’t changed. But the times have. The timing too.
This isn’t the moment, because such a house wouldn’t be used for the proper purpose, for the people of the city. I fear that just now it would be used for minority interests, so”—he paused, as if he needed to summon up the energy to go on—“at the next council meeting I’m going to withdraw my proposal that we should buy this house.”

There was a silence. Felicity and Alexander did not look at each other. Then Alexander said soberly, “Thank you for telling us, Mr. Ashworth.”

“You’d a right to know.” He gave Alexander a sideways glance. “You don’t always hear from the proper quarter.”

He stood up. Alexander and Felicity rose too and the three of them processed in silence around the edge of the curtain fabric and into the hall.

“Your Henry has done us all proud this week,” Alexander said.

Frank smiled for the first time.

“Cocky little monkey,” he said and went out in to the close.

Behind the closed door of the headmaster’s house Alexander said, “What is going on?”

Only fifteen governors could attend the emergency meeting summoned by the dean, but the necessary three clerical members were present in the dean, the archdeacon, and Canon Yeats. Bridget had taken enormous trouble to arrange the dining room like a boardroom with notepads and pencils and carafes of water, and she had made a batch of shortbread for Mrs. Ray to take in with the coffee. The dean had refused to discuss the matter with her—she tried to tell herself that this was perfectly proper of him—but she knew that what he was seeking was a vote from the governors of no confidence in Alexander Troy.

Alexander’s crime, in Bridget’s eyes, was not this nonsense over the choir, or even his use of school Speech Day as a personal platform, but his defiance of the dean. The only small ameliorating factor was that he was, undeniably, a gentleman. But the prestige of the high officers of the Church was to Bridget something sacred, something hardly to be subjected to the finger-snapping of lesser men. To her, such insolence was outrageous, and although she
believed sincerely that Alexander should be punished, she was also afraid that if he were dismissed, his replacement might well not be what she would care for at all. Hugh’s own stature would be diminished if he was entirely surrounded by men—here even Bridget hesitated in her mind over the words—men not of his own
sort
. Heaven knows, there were enough of them in the Church as it was.

When she had shut the last governor into the dining room, she went to her bureau to sort out the cathedral guides muddle which she had, ex officio, taken over from the chapter office. The chapter steward had not been in the least pleased about this, but as the guides rota had become terribly confused, with far too many unreliable members, he had not been in much of a position to refuse when Mrs. Cavendish had swept away the files, saying that she would sort them out. She had done just the same thing to the cathedral bookshop two years before and reorganized it to perfection and found a new manageress and aroused resentment and indignation all round. At least the Mistress of Embroideries, a fierce old academic doctor with an immense knowledge of historic fabrics and embroidery skills, had the strength of character to defend her own patch, and the voluntary team who cleaned the monuments had always had the discretion to lie very low indeed. The Friends of the Cathedral were slowly massing together for strength; as the bishop said with ironic regret to his wife, Bridget Cavendish was wonderful for
uniting
the diocese.

For an hour and a half she sat and made lists and rotas and telephone calls. Mrs. Ray went in with the coffee tray at precisely eleven, but in the seconds that the dining-room door was open, nothing could be heard but polite murmurs at the sight of biscuits. At noon, the door opened again and the governors began to surge into the hall. She sprang to show them out, bright with enquiring smiles. They thanked her gravely. Canon Yeats was the last, heaving himself on his sticks. She was most solicitous with him but he seemed not to notice her much, being preoccupied, it appeared, not so much with the deanery steps as with his thoughts. Huffo did not come out at all. Bridget assisted Canon Yeats down to the level of the close, and as she held the gate for him, she could not resist saying vivaciously, “I
do
hope the meeting went well!”

Canon Yeats stopped to look at her. He had never liked her. Her big handsomeness always reminded him of those dreadful bossy voluntary army women who had made his wartime army chaplaincy such a nightmare. “I should have liked,” he said to his wife later, “to have planted the end of my stick on her great bust and
pushed her over
” He gave her a glimmering little glance before turning away.

“It went well, Mrs. Cavendish, but it should never have been called in the first place. The ways we have fallen into are very wrong.”

She went back up the steps to the deanery. The dean was not in his study or in the dining room. Mrs. Ray met her in the hall between the two and said the dean had said not to wait lunch for him because he would be out until three and would pick up a sandwich. Mrs. Ray must have invented the last phrase because it was never one the dean would use. Bridget went out through the back door to the garage; the car was gone. She returned to the house, told Mrs. Ray that that would be all for today, thank you, and then climbed heavily up the staircase to the nobly windowed bedroom she had curtained and draped in convolvulus chintz, and where she and Hugh had now slept, side by side, for sixteen years. She sat down at her dressing table and looked at herself without the smallest atom of pleasure. Hugh had been defeated by the governors and had not felt that he could, or wanted to, come to her for comfort. She leaned her elbows on the glass surface, under which tens of photographs of her children lay imprisoned, and lowered her head into her hands, covering her eyes. The house was very quiet. In its silence, her elbows numbing on the cold glass, Bridget Cavendish went down, for the first time in her life, into the pain of love.

When the dean walked into the council offices, the receptionist, who knew everybody and everything, said that Mr. Ashworth wasn’t in today. The dean said in that case, he would be grateful to have a word with any senior councillor who could spare him a quarter of an hour. The receptionist said she would see what she could do,
and showed him into a small waiting room with a cactus on the table and racks around the walls full of public health leaflets. “Nobody will bother you in here,” she said to him, and shut him in.

He went, inevitably, to the window. It looked on to the car park and beyond that to a well-worn corner of the Lyng Gardens, where the grass had been rubbed off the earth around flower beds planted with the municipal favourites, scarlet salvias and orange African marigolds. There was a stout and gloomy girl slumped on a bench with a toddler strapped in a folding stroller by her, and beyond her two men lying flat out on the grassless earth with their heads covered by the same newspaper. It was one-thirty. The dean had driven about for over an hour, debating to himself. For once, he had not gone to the cathedral—he had vowed he would not go in except to services until the record makers had removed all their rubbish—but had instead made for the ring road and driven round that, mindlessly, like a donkey on a treadmill. At one point, he had turned off and gone down to the estuary and listened to the gulls, and bought a pork pie from a little corner shop, which he ate ravenously in the car. It had heartened him. He had turned the car back to the city and headed for the council offices.

They kept him waiting twenty minutes. He read about heroin addiction, whooping cough, dental care, and sexually transmitted diseases; then he found a batch on legal aid and citizens’ rights, and read those too. When the door opened and a different girl came in to say Mr. Thornton could see him now, he was reading the incase-of-fire instructions on the back of the door and she nearly knocked him over. She was embarrassed by his dog collar and addressed him as “you” because she did not know what else to call him. He followed her into a lift, and up two floors to a long corridor covered in carpet tiles, which echoed to the intermittent clack of typewriters.

Halfway down, she opened a half-glazed door and showed him in to a small room with two modern tweed-covered armchairs and a low table bearing only an ashtray. She went over to an inner door, knocked, and then opened it to say, “Your gentleman, Mr. Thornton.” She turned back to Hugh. “You can go in.”