James Lark - More Tea, Jesus?

The choir fumbled its way through the piece; it got progressively slower throughout and seemed to Ted to go on forever. When the final chord died away, he closed his eyes and didn’t speak for one and a half seconds.

Then he gave his considered appraisal. ‘That was without exception the most God-awful fucking noise I’ve ever heard in my entire life.’ The choir nodded in mute acceptance of this judgement. Ted generally told them this about everything they sang, although the exact expletives varied from week to week. ‘If I die tonight, I shall thank God with all my heart that he spared me from hearing that again,’ he continued. ‘Yes, Noreen?’ Noreen Ponty was holding her hand aloft, expectantly waiting to ask a question.

‘I wondered, Ted,’ she said, ‘how we’re pronouncing the word – er …’ She glanced at her music. ‘Er … “paisible”.’

‘Eh, what?’ barked Ted, ‘pay Sybil?’

‘No, er … “paisible”, on the third page.’

‘Good question, Noreen,’ Ted sarcastically answered. ‘Yes, that’s just what I was thinking, after listening to what probably counts as the worst crime ever committed against music – I thought, bloody hell, they don’t know how to pronounce “paisible”. What a bloody disaster.’

‘So … we’re saying “paisible”, are we?’

‘I couldn’t tell you what you are saying,’ Ted smiled sourly, ‘because I wasn’t listening to you at all lest it actually killed me.’ That this statement rather contradicted all of his previous judgements of the choir’s rendition went unnoticed except by a member of the choir who never made any noise at all, even to sing, so the discrepancy wasn’t pointed out. This was probably just as well.

‘What do you want us to say?’ Noreen persisted. Ted sighed.

‘Say it like … “passable”,’ he guessed.

‘Actually,’ Harriet Lomas contradicted him, with the knowing smile of one who has sung with the choir for several years and is therefore entitled to know more than the person directing it, ‘I think it’s more like “possible”, with a short vowel sound.’

‘Do you? And what do you think makes your opinion more correct than mine?’

‘Well,’ The knowing smile remained undiminished. ‘I spent five years working in France.’

This was the kind of mutiny that Ted resented most of all, because it was clearly entirely justified. ‘I don’t care if you were Fauré’s mistress,’ he sarcastically retorted, ‘I was a chorister in Winchester Cathedral choir. I also did French O-level.’

At this, Harriet’s smile withered abruptly. ‘But—’

‘Please shut up,’ Ted sighed, having had all of the argument he wanted to have. ‘We’ll run through it again, in the hope that one of you might have miraculously gained the ability to sing while I’ve been listening to this crap about French.’

Harriet glared at Ted through her large spectacles. She wasn’t going to argue back, because she was bigger than that. But she thought that Ted Sloper was the rudest man she knew and he had no right to talk to her like that.

‘What did you get?’ Gordon Spare asked Ted, suddenly.

‘What do you mean?’ Ted sighed.

‘What did you get in your French O-level?’

‘What does that have to do with anything?’ Ted angrily asked. (In actual fact he had failed his French O-level, and he certainly didn’t think this was the kind of detail that it was useful to bring to the discussion.)

‘I just thought,’ Gordon said, ‘if Harriet worked for five years in France – you know, five years …’

Ted closed his eyes. ‘I swear, this choir will be the death of me one day.’ He opened his eyes again and surveyed the dour group in front of him. ‘And as far as I’m concerned, the sooner that day comes, the better. Now can we run the bloody piece again, before we all die. Anne?’

There was another pause before Anne’s voice answered. ‘What?’

‘We’re going to run it again.’

‘Run what again?’ Jake and Lady Cardigan-Ainsley were in the middle of a particularly salacious scene, the vodka-and-lime incident having unfolded in exactly the direction Anne wanted it to, and she had rather been hoping her skills wouldn’t be called upon again during the rehearsal. They always seemed to spend so much time talking, anyway. ‘The Cantique, you stupid woman,’ hissed Ted. He rounded on the choir again and raised his hands to conduct. ‘It’s “passable”,’ he added, crossly, ‘even if your rendition of the piece isn’t.’

Bernard Lomas was a passionate person. His life was one of frustrated passions, an ongoing cycle of enthusiastic ideas passionately pursued for insufficient time to bear any fruit before a new infatuation developed.

As a young, ambitious man, his dream had been to earn a living from painting pictures of railway engines and transferring his artwork to crockery to be sold at unreasonably high prices, but circumstances had not worked in his favour and he had never managed to attain a secure enough position to put his strategy into action. This lack of security wasn’t so much a financial deficiency as an inability to paint; being a passionate man, he was also an impatient man (he told himself that the two characteristics naturally worked hand in hand), so he didn’t have the persistence to learn enough about painting to turn his dream into a reality. Instead, he continued to explore and discard different interests in the hope of finding his true vocation. He had gone through a phase of trying to start a career as a journalist, writing a couple of articles for amateur publications before getting bored and taking up the accordion. He had a brief obsession with tropical fish, which died as quickly as it had started along with most of the tropical fish themselves.

Bernard’s current obsession was with the art of cinema. Having spent half a year’s wages purchasing the best digital-video equipment with all the related software and essential appendages, he was determined to make the film that would propel him into the fast lane of the media world: a documentary about life in Little Collyweston. He hoped to exploit every link he had, including his wife’s strong connections with the church; he was aware that she sang in a choir, and gathered from her that it was rather good. Perhaps, he thought, he could make a documentary about the choir itself and sell it to the BBC – they had been rather short of ideas lately, after all.

Apart from his failure to make time to learn the necessary skills, the main problem with all of Bernard’s plans had been the need to earn money. To this end, he unwillingly worked for a government office in which he was supposed to encourage agricultural development. In essence, this involved a routine of regular meetings with tedious people in suits. Even the women wore suits these days. He couldn’t understand how the people he worked with could be so dull and he would spend many hours a day ranting about the unambitious state of affluent, middle-class society, whilst scribbling pictures of railways engines onto notepads and dreaming of his Little Collyweston documentary. Perhaps he could make a whole series – sixteen episodes, each lasting about an hour and featuring a different aspect of the village. The BBC would love that.

On this particular day, he had decided that, as an artist, he was excluded from the rules that governed ordinary, unambitious people, people who were part of the system, so he was justified in taking the day off work to familiarise himself with his new digital camcorder. So convincingly disease-ridden had his phone call to the office sounded that he was now half-wondering whether he might have potential as an actor. It was worth bearing in mind, he thought, for the best directors often acted in their own films.