The World Cannot Give, page 6
The silence crisps into awkwardness, and Laura realizes that Bonnie is staring at her, waiting for her to answer.
“Yeah,” says Laura. “Yeah, sure, totally.”
Bonnie breaks out into a smile. “I knew you’d understand,” she says. She fiddles with her phone. She takes a deep breath. “I’m scared. Dare me.”
“What?”
“Say I dare you.”
“I dare you?”
Bonnie grins. She closes her eyes. She touches her phone. “There,” she says at last. “I sent it.” She exhales.
She turns to Laura.
“He’s a good person, you know,” she says. “He doesn’t think he is. But he is. I see that. It’s just—hard for him. With her.”
Laura realizes, with new interest, that Bonnie is talking about Virginia.
“What do you mean?”
“They’re best friends,” Bonnie says. “Ever since freshman year. I mean—I’m not jealous, or anything. Everyone knows Virginia isn’t into guys. Or people at all, really.”
Laura registers this.
“I think he feels weird about dating if she doesn’t,” Bonnie says. “Like he’s betraying her somehow. Because she won’t. He says he thinks of her like his kid sister. He’s protective. It’s one of the things I like most about him.”
Laura can’t imagine Virginia needing protection from anyone.
“But soon,” Bonnie says. “Soon,” she says again, more firmly this time. She blows out the candle.
* * *
Laura lies awake thinking about Virginia.
She ponders Miranda’s loathing, Isobel’s grudging respect, Brad’s protectiveness, trying to weigh how they could possibly all be directed toward the same person, let alone toward a person who hardly seems like a person at all.
Laura’s hour in the crypt has unsettled her. Only, when she thinks of those moments, singing, Virginia’s hair falling over her tiny lace-edged wrists on the organ keyboard, Virginia’s hair falling over Laura’s shoulders, she thinks only that Virginia Strauss, as terrifying as she is, must be the most wonderful person in the world.
Maybe, Laura thinks, wonderful people are always a little bit terrifying. World-Historical people must be. If she met Sebastian Webster, she’d probably be terrified of him, too.
It’s like what Virginia had said about hideous things, how the things that horrify you are the ones you know to trust.
Maybe, she thinks, that’s how she knows she can trust Virginia.
Laura stays awake, too shot through with joy to sleep, until the first breaking-in of dawn. Then she goes to the window. Then she waits. Then she watches, breathless, as the Desmond door opens and a slim figure emerges and then gallops toward the woods, and the water, alone.
3
LAURA SPENDS THE NEXT DAY waiting for Evensong. She can’t pay attention in Latin, nor in Calculus; by Topics in European History, she is so rapt in anticipation that she doesn’t even hear Dr. Meyer asking her what Locke had to say about paternal power, even when he calls her name three times. She can’t eat lunch. She picks at dinner.
“You’re not dieting, are you?” Bonnie’s eyes narrow. “Because if you are you should tell me. I have experience. I can make sure you’re getting all your macros.”
Bonnie picks a piece of raw tofu off her fork.
“I’m fine,” Laura says. “Just tired. Schoolwork.”
“That’s St. Dunstan’s for you,” Freddy says darkly. “Small fish. Big pond. Get used to it.” She looks pleased with herself. “Everyone has to, sooner or later.”
At six forty-five, the bells ring; then Laura can no longer breathe.
She walks with Bonnie and Freddy across Devonshire Quad. She lets them muscle her into the front pew. She catches sight of Isobel and Miranda, hand in hand, in one of the back rows, but she can’t bring herself to acknowledge them.
It’s not like she’s betrayed them or anything, she tells herself. She signed that petition. All she’s done is join a choir—plus, she isn’t even formally in. Even Isobel, she tells herself, never said a person couldn’t join choir if they wanted to.
Bonnie waves to Brad. Brad winces a smile. Laura watches Virginia stiffen slightly, and she stiffens, too, instinctively, in case Virginia holds her responsible for Bonnie being Bonnie. But Virginia keeps her face upward, implacable, turning her chin just slightly toward the pews, the edges of her mouth curling in a smile that Laura realizes, too late, is directed at her.
By the time Laura smiles back, Virginia’s gaze is already in the middle distance.
Probably, Laura decides, Isobel and Miranda are too hard on Virginia. It’s simply, Laura thinks, kindling the warm glow of approval, that Virginia has high standards for people. She tries not to think about hell.
Then service begins, and Laura stops thinking altogether.
It passes so much more delicately this week. No longer overwhelmed by its sheer novelty, Laura can pay attention to all the little details: how Barry Ng finishes the prelude from the organ loft and then tiptoes under St. Peter to get to the choir stalls in time for the Magnificat, how Reverend Tipton bows his head when he says, Thine is the day, and also the night; the syncopated echo on the floor when everybody gets down to kneel to confess their sins; the eerie, echoing a cappella chant of the Psalms; how Brad Noise’s warbling tenor carries on the Nunc Dimittis; that line from the General Thanksgiving, with the old Elizabethan language, about how we shew forth thy praise / not only with our lips, but in our lives, which strikes Laura as such a fittingly wonderful way to talk about being alive. It is only when they murmur, all together, the Apostles’ Creed, the I believe in God, the Father almighty, that Laura feels a slight prickling of guilt. It makes her feel like she’s lying, saying a thing like that, when she has no idea whether there even is a God, whether Isobel is right that it’s ridiculous that the whole school has to say it, whether they mean it or not. She cranes her neck, trying to catch another glimpse of Isobel and Miranda. They remain sitting. Their lips don’t move.
Only then the choir starts up singing again, and Laura forgets what she is worrying about, because to worry you need to be capable of conscious thought, and when Virginia and the rest of them sing, Laura can’t think about anything at all.
If there is a God, she decides, when they at last fall silent, He must be in that harmony, too.
It ends so quickly. Suddenly it is dark outside, and Reverend Tipton is putting out the candle lights, one by one, and everyone is filing out along the nave.
“Come on.” Bonnie loops her arm around Laura’s. “I want you to meet Brad.”
Bonnie prances up the nave before Laura can stop her.
“Brad!”
He looks up so awkwardly when he sees her.
“Bonnie?”
Virginia’s face is frozen in disdain.
“You sounded great!” Bonnie’s head bobs on her neck. “All of you. Gorgeous. I got chills!” She swivels back to Brad. “You could, like, totally go to Juilliard or something. If you wanted.”
Barry Ng blushes at this. Virginia glares at him.
Brad sighs a long and heavy sigh.
“One of Bonnie’s best qualities,” he says slowly, catching Laura’s eye, “is her tolerance for mediocrity.” His mouth distends into an apologetic grin.
Bonnie just laughs.
“Don’t be shy, Brad.” Bonnie touches his shoulder.
Virginia arches an eyebrow; Laura looks at the floor.
“He’s so shy about his talents. Anyway, this is my friend Laura.” Laura recoils at friend and then feels guilty about it. “We’re roomies.”
“Hello, Laura.” His nod is perfunctory.
“It’s nice to meet you.” Laura wills herself to make eye contact. “I’ve, uh, heard a lot about you.”
Brad bites his lip. He rocks on his heels.
“Well,” he says, “you’re in for a disappointment.” He smiles, pained, and Bonnie laughs too loud.
“Right.” Reverend Tipton is making his way down the nave. “Terribly sorry. It’s just—erm.” He makes a fumbling gesture at his watch. “Probably good to, erm, keep to time, you know.” He shuffles past them.
Bonnie swivels to him. “You were great, too,” she says. “How do you remember all those lines every time?”
Virginia’s lips contort into a sneer. “It’s not a play, Bonnie,” she says.
Reverend Tipton looks from Virginia to Bonnie and back again. His nose twitches. “I mean, erm, we do have it all written out for us. Just in case. In the Book of Common Prayer.” He exhales. “Lucky, that.” He waits helplessly for someone else to say something. “Ah, anyway, shall we…” He motions at the loft stairs.
Virginia snaps to attention. “Gentlemen! Come along,” she says. “No dawdling!”
Anton bounds toward the staircase. Ralph, Barry, and Ivan trot after him.
Bonnie smiles vaguely. “Well, it was nice seeing you,” she says to Brad. “We should just… me and Laura, I mean—we actually have dinner plans. In town. At the Wayfarer.” She yanks Laura down the nave.
There is no getting out of it now.
“Actually…” Laura unloops her arm from Bonnie’s. “I was planning to stay.”
Bonnie rounds on her in confusion.
“So you’re the new girl,” Brad says at last.
Laura stares at the floor.
“You mean…” It takes Bonnie a second longer to work it out.
“I just auditioned,” Laura says, without looking up. “That’s all.”
“Oh,” Bonnie says, nodding a little too intensely. “Great. Great. Good for you. That’s so—great.” Her smile is pasted on. “Have a great night!”
Her heels echo off the rafters as she totters out.
* * *
Reverend Tipton leads them all up to the choir loft.
“Right,” he says. He eyes Laura. “You weren’t here last week.”
“She’s new,” Virginia says quickly. “She auditioned for me last night.”
Reverend Tipton looks from Virginia to Laura and back again. “For you?”
“I always run auditions,” Virginia says. “Heeno—Reverend Heenan, I mean—always specially requested it.” She gnaws on her lower lip. “Less trouble that way.” She clears her throat. “It’s worked smoothly up to now,” she says.
He looks her over. “Right,” he says. He looks unconvinced. “Very good.”
They do scales. They practice chanting the Psalms. They do next week’s Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis, which are by Hubert Parry, and Laura tries to keep up without looking desperate. She is all too conscious that her music-reading knowledge is only rudimentary—half-remembered assortments of sharps and quarter notes and flats and rests garnered from middle school recorder lessons—but she keeps close to little Ivan Dixon, who is singing alto, too, and finds she can follow along with him.
She comes to know everybody’s voices: Brad’s arch and elegant tenor; Anton’s bombastic bass, which fills the loft so completely that Laura wonders she can hear anyone else at all. Laura comes to recognize the self-satisfied punctuation of Ralph’s jovial baritone, a little too full—or so Virginia informs him after a run-through of the Magnificat—of unrestrained emotion; to recognize, too, Barry’s careful, note-perfect melodies, how he can vary his register with every piece’s need: on baritone in one, on tenor in the next. Laura starts to anticipate Ivan’s intermittent, crystalline eruptions of sound—like little cries, Laura thinks, of joy or pain. Reverend Tipton keeps chords on the organ, and Laura marvels, with every run-through, at how the piece comes together.
Laura falls in love with each of them, a little, in turn, because of their voices.
But it’s Virginia Laura can’t stop watching: leaning in over the organ—just a little too close to Reverend Tipton, who has to arch his back to see the music through her dark-falling hair. Laura can’t stop watching everyone else watching her.
Laura worries, at first, Virginia will look up, that Virginia will perceive her hangdog adoration and know what a fool she is, letting this affect her.
But Virginia’s eyes are fixed instead on Reverend Tipton: on his hands turning the pages of the music, on his brow furrowing over the odd false note, on the veins in his neck, bulging and receding like the pipes of an organ. She blushes a little when he turns to her; she lowers her gaze and bites her lip.
She’s looking at him, Laura realizes, like she cares what he thinks.
* * *
“I’m so relieved,” Virginia tells him, when at last they declare the Nunc Dimittis in good enough shape to set aside, “that you’re keeping up the standard of this place. I was so worried the new chaplain would want us to switch to that horrible Rite Two. But then, you know, I Googled you, and I read about all your past work.”
He looks up at her, perplexed.
“As soon as I read your thesis,” she goes on, “I knew we could rely on you. I always used to tell Heeno: the old language, you know, the old ways—you can really hear the voices of the Oxford martyrs in them.” Her eyes blaze. “You can’t expect anyone to take worship seriously if you use those silly modern liturgies, the ones that water everything down to make everything accessible. And also with you and all that. I’m sure you didn’t use modern language at Oriel College Oxford.” She laughs and draws out the word.
Reverend Tipton considers her. His eyebrows wriggle like insects.
“Well,” he says tightly, “there are, erm, benefits, to accessibility, you know. From a pastoral perspective. One wants people to feel welcome in church.”
Virginia flinches, but only slightly.
“Of course,” she says. Then, with more emphasis. “Naturally. From a pastoral perspective.” She clears her throat.
“No change!” Anton bellows suddenly. “That’s what I always say.” He thumps the organ. “If it was good enough for John Devonshire, back in 1790, then it’s good enough for us now.”
“Hear, hear,” says Ralph.
Now Virginia smiles. “Or Sebastian Webster.” She catches Laura’s gaze and holds it, waiting for Laura to return her smile, before looking back at Reverend Tipton. “As far as I’m concerned”—she gets a little louder—“that’s my guiding principle for life. Whenever I’m not sure what to do next”—she takes a deep breath—“I always ask myself, What would Sebastian Webster do?”
Reverend Tipton smiles vaguely.
“Huh,” he says idly. “Never read him.”
He turns back to his music.
* * *
“I was thinking,” says Virginia, as she and Laura walk back to Desmond together across Devonshire Quad. “We really should band together, as a choir, to buy him a copy of All Before Them. If he’s going to be teaching here…” Her voice trails off. “Of course he’ll love it. He’s a very serious person. He’s an actual intellectual, not a neoliberal fossil like Heeno. Oriel was Newman’s college, you know.”
Laura doesn’t, but she smiles and nods anyway. The remnants of the music scrape against the inside of her throat, like stray swallowed pieces of shell. The moon shines bright and full upon them.
“You have an amazing voice,” Laura says at last.
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do.”
Virginia’s smile twitches. “My voice,” she says matter-of-factly, without any trace of self-pity, “is average.” She looks up at Laura. “Totally middle-of-the-road. That’s why I have to work so hard. Sure, it’s good now, but only because I practice as much as I do. If I had a voice like yours…” She falls silent for a moment. “I don’t mind having to work for things. Nothing worth having ever comes easy.”
She opens the Desmond door for Laura with her key card. She checks her wristwatch.
“I’ll see you later,” she says. “I’m going to get in a run before curfew.”
She is gone before Laura can answer her.
* * *
Bonnie doesn’t look up from her phone when Laura gets in. She is zooming into photographs of herself, adjusting them with her fingertips, replying to Laura’s sheepish pleasantries with monosyllables.
“You know,” she murmurs, when Laura gets into bed. “You could have said.”
“It only happened last night,” Laura says. “And I didn’t know for sure. Not until rehearsal. They could have still cut me.” She doesn’t know if she’s lying.
Bonnie keeps scrolling. She makes a show of sighing, with increasing volume, until at last she caves. “Did Brad say anything?”
“Brad?”
“Like a message for me,” Bonnie says. “Or something.” Her voice notches up an octave.
“I…” Laura doesn’t mean to lie exactly. In the moment it feels like kindness. “He said to say hello,” Laura says. “And that he’s looking forward to seeing you soon.”
Bonnie’s owlish eyes glaze over with satisfaction. “Oh,” she says, weighing anew the practical merits of Laura’s membership in choir. “Well, that’s nice. Tell him I’m excited to see him, too.” She sits up straight. She swivels her head. “Was it amazing?” She has forgotten her anger. “I bet it was amazing.”
“It was.”
“Do they have, like, an initiation ritual?” Bonnie asks. “Like—something cool, in Latin? All the secret societies do cool things with Latin. I mean, obviously, you don’t have to tell me. But…” She leans in. “Blink once if there is an initiation ritual; blink twice if there isn’t.” Laura blinks instinctively. “Was that one or two? Sorry. Sorry.”
“Honestly,” says Laura. “We just sang. That’s all.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all,” says Laura.
“Huh,” says Bonnie. She wriggles under the covers.
* * *
Laura doesn’t see Virginia all weekend, although she keeps her customary morning vigil. But the following Tuesday afternoon, as Laura scurries down the corridors of Mountbatten, three minutes late on her way to Assembly, she hears someone calling her.
