Free The Choir by Joanna Trollope

came to chapter meetings on horseback and came stamping in shouting for sandwiches because his ride had made him so hungry. Would you excuse me?”
    “I owe you an apology,” Sally said, turning to Leo with the same directness that he had recognized in her son. “It was idiotic of me to telephone you the other night. If I had just had the patience to wait until today, I should have obtained the answer to my question.” She looked at Nicholas and gave a self-deprecating smile. “I telephonedMr. Beckford late at night to ask if he thought Henry’s voice was just good or really good.”
    Nicholas, still full of the warmth of his determination to be generous, smiled back and said again, “He’s really great.”
    “He’s a nice chap, too,” Leo said. “Very straightforward. No trouble at all.”
    “He’s no trouble at home. Of course, he isn’t yet—”
    “Hello,” Ianthe Cavendish said. She was wearing her black cotton jacket and a long tube skirt made of striped T-shirt material and a single huge silver earring of twisted wire and black beads.
    Leo looked down at her with displeasure.
    “What are you doing here?”
    “I’m the dean’s daughter,” Ianthe said. The fingernails of one hand were painted plum colour. “Remember?” She turned to Sally. “Hello.”
    “I’m Sally Ashworth.”
    “And this,” Leo said, cutting in, “is Nicholas Elliott. I told you about him.”
    Ianthe eyed him.
    “Know anything about music?”
    “I did—”
    “Rock music?”
    “Well, I listen to it—”
    “I run a record company,” Ianthe said, “rock bands. We’ve signed up some amazing new people. Hey”—she turned to Sally again—“was that your kid? The one with the great voice?”
    “She doesn’t usually talk like this,” Leo said. “This is her streetwise accent for company. She can sound perfectly normal if she wants to.”
    “Tell you what,” Ianthe said to Sally, ignoring him, “wouldn’t mind signing up your kid. Course, he couldn’t sing that stuff for us—”
    “Go away,” Leo said, suddenly really cross. “Go away and show off to someone more impressionable. Nicholas, take her away. Tell her what you want in life and see if she can help you. See if she can actually be of use for once.”
    A gleam of pathos softened the bravado in Ianthe’s eye, but she quelled it. She took Nicholas by the arm.
    “Aren’t you a bit hard?” Sally said when they had gone. “She’s awfully young.”
    “She’s awfully
silly
. You are the second person to accuse me of hardness this afternoon. I must be getting cantankerous, living alone and thinking of nothing but sacred music and small boys. Heavens!” he said, breaking off and laughing. “That might have been better put—”
    “Isn’t it odd, that the dean’s children should all be so—so unorthodox?”
    “Don’t you think it’s inevitable?”
    “Do you mean because of the Church—”
    “Yes.”
    “You think that girl’s in love with you. That’s why you were so rude to her.”
    “She thinks she is too. I’m trying to be as unlovable as possible.”
    “But you make yourself very attractive if you are rude to her.”
    Leo looked at her.
    “Do I?”
    “Yes.”
    “Lord. But if I’m nice,
think
what would happen.”
    “But only briefly. Very intense, but over quickly. Then she would get bored.”
    “With my being nice?”
    “Yes. Because it isn’t so glamorous. Moody and mean is much sexier.”
    Leo smiled broadly.
    “I haven’t had a conversation like this for ages. I’d forgotten what it was like. Would you like some more chapter house tea?”
    “No, thank you.”
    “Why did you ring me, honestly, the other night?”
    Sally said without hesitation, “Loneliness.”
    “But Henry was in the house and he presumably has a father—”
    “He’s in Saudi Arabia. And Henry is a boy and is separate and he is a true musician, and I am not, and that makes him moreseparate. I am not complaining, I am absolutely sick with