Elusive Harmony (The Warrender Saga Book 10)

by Mary Burchell

  ELUSIVE HARMONY

  Mary Burchell

  © Mary Burchell 1976

  Mary Burchell has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1976 by Mills & Boon Limited.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter One

  ‘Someone will have to tell him.’ Charles Drury scribbled an aimless line or two on the pad in front of him and then looked up at the girl who was standing very still by the window. ‘Do you want me to do it?’

  ‘No.’ She moved at last and shook her head. ‘It’s better I should. A humiliation comes better from a daughter, I suppose, than from even the most devoted of secretaries.’

  ‘You think he’ll take it badly?’

  ‘Of course he’ll take it badly! Even at fifty-four’—automatically Natalie took five years off her father’s age—‘and with years of honour and glory behind him, he’s still like a child in his love of his position.’

  ‘We-ell——’ Charles Drury rubbed his chin meditatively. ‘If you’ve been one of’—he corrected himself quickly—‘if you’ve been the greatest tenor in the world for a couple of decades it isn’t easy to have to step down.’

  ‘He hasn’t done that yet,’ she countered sharply. And then, as there was silence from her companion, she said sadly, ‘I sometimes think the audience have the best of it. The artists have so much anguish as well as joy and triumph.’

  ‘Both have their compensations,’ Charles replied. ‘The people who have the worst of it are the poor wretches who have to act as the buffer between the artists and the public.’

  ‘And that’s you and me?’ she smiled ruefully and he thought how attractively those smoky blue eyes of hers lit up when she did that.

  ‘More you than me,’ he conceded. ‘I do have some sort of regular hours. Within limits,’ he added with a grimace as he reflected on the charming, insistent demands which his employer could make upon him. ‘But for you it’s twenty-four hours out of twenty-four, isn’t it? Does it never occur to you that perhaps you’re wasting your life, Natalie?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘There are times when it seems to me that time is rushing past and I am standing still, but there isn’t much else I can do. He’s so utterly dependent on me in so many ways.’

  ‘Isn’t that taking daughterly, devotion too far?’ Charles sounded a trifle impatient.

  She smiled and shook her head. ‘It wasn’t I who started it, you know. My mother did. And by the time I came into the picture he was so set in his ways—so utterly dependent on someone to cherish and support and reassure him—that it would have been like taking away a prop from a magnificent building and leaving it to crumble, if I hadn’t stepped into the breach.’

  ‘Was that how it was? I’ve sometimes wondered. I didn’t know your mother, of course. She died the year before I came to work for your father.’

  ‘She was,’ said Natalie Harding slowly, ‘the most amazing person. Astonishingly beautiful and attractive and vital in her own right, but completely satisfied to put all her gifts at his disposal. She adored him. And, to be perfectly fair, he adored her too, and was as proud of her as if he’d invented her himself.’

  ‘And you?’ Charles Drury asked drily. ‘Where did you come in the picture?’

  ‘Oh—’ Natalie frowned thoughtfully and then said, entirely without rancour, ‘I was almost incidental, I suppose. They were both fond of me in an absentminded sort of way, but I’m sure they forgot my very existence for days on end when I was at school. Artists are like that.’

  ‘But she wasn’t an artist,’ he protested.

  ‘No. But she was a sort of extension of him. She almost literally lived in and for him. There are always sacrifices involved, I suppose, if you are helping to make a great artist.’

  ‘It’s monstrous!’ He sounded genuinely angry.

  ‘Of course it is.’ She laughed, this time with real amusement. ‘But the compensations are terrific—when everything goes well. I once heard someone say that great artists tend to be half genius and half monster. I wouldn’t go as far as that. But they do things one couldn’t accept in ordinary people and then, just as you could kill them, they lift you out of the humdrum world of reality in such a way that you could adore them. My father could do just that. You know it as Well as I do.’

  He nodded wordlessly. And after a moment she said, almost as though she could not help it, ‘He can still do it.—Can’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ Charles Drury agreed slowly, ‘he can still do it. But not so frequently and not so—reliably. That’s why he isn’t being offered the lead in this new work.’

  She shivered involuntarily.

  ‘I imagine your mother never had to deal with a situation like this,’ he said reflectively. ‘In her time it was one long string of successes, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, yes! All the world was their gorgeous, glittering stage, and I’m not being prejudiced when I say they adorned it superbly. It wasn’t only the glamour and the money and the intoxication of success. They were such artists in everything they did. He lived for music and the perfecting of his God-given talents, and she lived for him and everything he stood for. And then, quite suddenly—she died.’ Natalie made an expressive gesture with her hands, and it occurred to Charles Drury that she had inherited something of her father’s genius for conveying everything with the simplest of movements.

  ‘It was in my last few weeks at school,’ she recalled musingly. ‘I was sent for, and I came home to find him in total collapse. It must have seemed to him that the sun had been put out and the birds had ceased to sing. I remember thinking, “Do people literally die of a broken heart? and is that what is going to happen to him?” It was Oscar Warrender—the famous conductor, you know—who almost tore him out of the slough of despond. He invented some frightful dilemma, in which only my father could get them out of a casting difficulty. He came across the Atlantic himself and fetched him. And I went too.

  ‘It was several years since my father had sung at the Met and so it wasn’t so full of agonising memories of Mother as some other places. I did what I could—comforting him, supporting him, filling her place in some small degree. And Warrender of course was marvellous. It ended in Father scoring one of the greatest artistic triumphs of his life, and at the end he had found his new offstage rôle. He was no longer the golden tenor with the world his plaything, he was the great artist who had known tragedy and could therefore interpret everything afresh.’

  ‘You said that entirely without sarcasm, didn’t you?’ Charles cocked an amused eyebrow at her.

  ‘Of course.’ Natalie looked faintly surprised. ‘It’s the truth.’

  ‘That he plays a rôle offstage as well as on? Doesn’t that make you put your tongue in your cheek a little?’

  ‘No. That’s how God made him. It’s as much part of him as his heavenly voice. Who am I to criticise?’

  ‘Well, that’s one way of looking at it, I suppose.’ Charles conceded with a laugh. ‘Your father is a lucky man. In so far as he has you, I mean,’ he added rather awkwardly as he remembered the shock in store for his employer.

  ‘I wish Dermot Deane had waited to tell him until we got back to London,’ Natalie said with a sigh. ‘Why did he have to send a letter after
him to Germany? It’s been such a happy tour. Particularly the concert last night.’

  ‘Perhaps that will soften the blow,’ suggested Charles.

  ‘No, it will highlight the insult,’ retorted Natalie. ‘For that’s how he’ll regard it, you know.’ She went over to the window again and stood looking down into the sunny, tree-lined street of this charming German town, which had once been a ducal preserve and even now retained something of the provincial elegance of earlier days.

  ‘He’s coming now,’ she said softly. ‘You’d better go, Charles.’ And as she stood watching her tall, handsome father stop by an ornamental fountain to address a few smiling, gracious words to a group of children playing there, she heard Charles go out, closing the door after him.

  Kind Charles! devoted Charles, who ably shouldered so much of the actual work involved in her father’s career. But when it came to something personal and basic like this, there was only Natalie to deal with it. She wondered how her mother would have tackled it. Had it really been roses and triumphs all the way for her? or had she too sometimes had to deal with seeming disaster and humiliation?

  That was the word which stuck in one’s throat. It would be such humiliation for him to be set aside for a younger man, when all the indications had been that he could expect this new, important rôle to be his almost by right of his position in the operatic world.

  ‘It’s not just vanity and pride, in the petty sense,’ she thought, almost as though she were trying to convince someone else of the truth of this. ‘He has been at the top—and deservedly so—for half his professional life. He’d be a fool if, artist that he is, he couldn’t assess his own real worth.’ And her father was anything but a fool, she knew, so far as his art was concerned.

  But in every career of this sort a time had to come which was like the striking of midnight to Cinderella. The first chill, unmistakable sign that the glory was about to depart. Or at least to be dimmed.

  She turned as the door opened and her father entered, and she thought for the thousandth time how splendid he was to look at. He never just came into a room, like other people. He quite simply made an entrance, without fuss or any exaggeration of movement, just as he came on to a stage and immediately reduced everyone else to lesser importance. A few of the very greatest have this quality, which is something one can neither teach nor learn. Drama flows naturally outward from them and where they stand there is the centre of the stage. Those who have it in any one period can usually be counted on the fingers of one hand.

  ‘It’s a wonderful afternoon,’ observed Lindley Harding, and immediately the conventional statement took on a special depth of meaning, so that the beauty of the afternoon followed him into the hotel sitting-room as an almost living thing.

  ‘Yes,’ said his daughter inadequately. And then, as he crossed to the desk, ‘Father, there’s a letter from Dermot Deane. I opened it in case it was something urgent.’

  ‘Quite right,’ replied her father, who was almost uniformly bored by the business side of his career. ‘Had he anything important to say?’

  This was the moment, and Natalie drew a deep breath.

  ‘Most of it was unimportant——’

  ‘Dermot has a genius for noting trivialities, dear fellow,’ observed her father indulgently.

  ‘But he does write quite positively about the casting for Beverley Caine’s new opera.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ The well-shaped hand which had been extended towards the desk was suddenly arrested, in a moment of stillness which was almost heart-stopping in its eloquence.

  ‘The principal tenor rôle has gone to Laurence Morven.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of him,’ said Lindley Harding coldly, in a tone which consigned the gentleman to total obscurity.

  ‘Oh, Father, you must have! He made a great success in Andréa Chénier at San Francisco, and——’

  ‘I don’t follow the careers of secondary artists,’ replied her father simply. ‘How came the management to make such a mistake? That rôle requires an artist of maturity and experience. In the hands of a beginner——’

  ‘I don’t think anyone could call Laurence Morven a beginner,’ Natalie interrupted unhappily. ‘He——’

  ‘Have you heard him?’

  ‘No, of course not. You know I haven’t.’

  ‘Then don’t offer an opinion upon him,’ said her father, apparently unaware that he was doing exactly that himself. ‘I suppose he has youth on his side.’ He curled his handsome mouth with an air that had made him a matchless Don Carlos in his time. ‘Youth!’ he repeated the word as though it were a prime insult. ‘I presume he can gallop about the stage making himself ridiculous and leap up and down the staircases so beloved of modern producers. The idea is preposterous. Get Dermot on the telephone for me.’

  ‘He won’t be in his office on a Saturday afternoon.’

  ‘Then get him at his home. And don’t make silly objections, Natalie. You know they make me nervous and irritable.’

  Natalie went through all the necessary motions, hoping cravenly that her father’s agent would be out of England, or at least engaged elsewhere. But within a few minutes she heard his cheerful voice say, ‘Dermot Deane here.’

  ‘Oh, Mr Deane, it’s Natalie Harding. My father——’

  The receiver was gently but firmly removed from her hand and her father, leaning against the desk with extraordinary grace for a man of his age, said, ‘What is this nonsense, Dermot, about the casting of Kit Marlowe in the new Beverley Caine opera?’

  There was a slight pause, then Natalie heard her father say smoothly, ‘Don’t speak so fast, my dear fellow. All I need are the simple facts.’

  After which—and before his agent at the other end of the wire could give any more simple facts—he went on to analyse the part in detail, explaining why it was quite impossible that anyone other than himself could sing the rôle.

  ‘What’s that you say?—That I have everything required for the part?—Well, it isn’t for me to say so, but since you put it that way—Except what? I can’t hear you. Except youth? My dear chap, youth isn’t what is needed for this part of Kit Marlowe. What?—Yes, of course I know Marlowe died young, historically speaking. But what has that to do with opera? Salome was sixteen, come to that, when she started cutting capers for the head of John the Baptist; but that hasn’t prevented many a soprano of forty puffing her way through the Dance of the Seven Veils.—That isn’t the same thing? Well, it damn well nearly is, you know.’

  As far as Natalie could judge, Dermot Deane cut in with some determination at this point because her father was obviously constrained to listen. And, glancing at him anxiously, she saw that the indulgent smile had faded from his face and that the faint lines round his handsome eyes had deepened.

  Finally, he said rather heavily, though still with a note of incredulity in his expressive voice, ‘You mean it’s all settled?’

  Apparently it was all settled, because he was silent again for nearly a minute. Then he seemed to draw an almost tangible cloak of dignity round him as he observed, ‘Then there’s nothing more for me to say. Except that I’m sorry—I’m very sorry indeed—to think that poor Beverley Caine’s fine work is doomed to failure even before it goes into rehearsal.’

  On this splendid valedictory remark he replaced the telephone. But Natalie was shocked and dismayed to see that his hand was trembling so much that he actually rattled the receiver on its stand.

  She had never known such a thing happen before. Like most fine stage artists, her father was in superb command of his nerves and muscles. Even in the worst days, after the death of her mother and during the emotional collapse which followed, his step had remained firm and his carriage upright. She had never seen his hand tremble even then. And now it was shaking like—like the hand of an old man.

  The comparison came unbidden to her mind, and gave her the sharpest sense of pity and dismay she had ever known.

  ‘I’m so sorry, darling.’ She came over to him, a
s he sank down into an armchair, and put her hand on his shoulder. ‘I know it’s dreadfully disappointing. But there are so many other rôles——’

  ‘It’s not for myself I’m distressed.’ He seemed quite unaware that this was palpably untrue. ‘I’m grieved—yes, truly grieved—for poor Caine.’

  Natalie was silent, feeling virtually certain that poor Caine had been one of those most eager to have the young, much-praised Laurence Morven for his work. Then with tact and skill—and long experience—she exerted herself to make just the right amount and type of conversation needed to raise her father’s spirits. She referred, though almost passingly, to various successes of his, lingering for some moments on his remarkable triumph in the concert of the previous evening.

  Presently he said he thought he would rest for a while. And he went into his bedroom, leaving Natalie to wonder if the worst were over, or if in actual fact he simply had to be alone with the raw realisation that for certain rôles he was apparently no longer the top choice.

  She sought out Charles, gave him a brief account of what had happened, and then, released from the immediate pressure of her responsibilities, she went out of the hotel for half an hour of blessed solitude in the small nearby park which had once been the gardens of the ducal residence.

  It was soothingly peaceful, strolling along through alternating sunshine and shade, and she was glad to reflect that, as she and her father were not flying back home until the next day, even the minor problem of packing need not be dealt with urgently. If he really were going to take this unexpected rebuff fairly well, it might prove to be a relatively painless first step away from the full noonday sun of his brilliant career. If, on the other hand——

  She never got as far as formulating the alternative, because at that moment a loutish youth on a fast bicycle came charging out of a side turning, caught her a glancing blow, saw that though she staggered she had not actually fallen and, calling back a casual apology in German, rode on.