Appassionata

by Jilly Cooper

‘Flor-ah,’ hissed Marcus, retrieving his baseball cap and looking nervously at an ancient dozing assistant.

  ‘Hope to God she doesn’t come to life like Hermione’s statue in The Winter’s Tale.’ Getting out a Pentel, Flora drew a big black moustache on Hermione’s upper lip.

  Abby was clutching her sides and Flora was lighting an illicit cigarette. Then the temperature plummeted as though they had just stepped out of a plane in the Arctic Circle, and they found themselves confronting a fearsome, lifelike Rannaldini, brandishing his baton like a dirk. Everything was in place, the gardenia, the trained grey hair, the three inches of dazzling white cuff.

  ‘Waving his wand like the wicked fairy,’ said Flora stonily, ‘Good afternoon, Maestro.’ Drawing heavily on her cigarette, she shoved it between Rannaldini’s fingers.

  ‘If I was wearing a pin, we could stick it into him,’ said Abby.

  By now their giggling had roused the attendant. Marcus hastily distracted him by asking where they could find Abigail Rosen’s waxwork. He’s got a beautiful voice, thought Abby, a bit like Prince Charles’s but with a slight break in it.

  The attendant hadn’t recognized Abby and, after much head-scratching and consulting of lists, announced that her waxwork had been melted down because she wasn’t considered famous enough any more.

  ‘I flew too near the sun,’ said Abby tonelessly.

  Once they got outside, she crumpled against Marcus.

  ‘I guess I’m an applause-junkie worse than Hermione,’ she sobbed into his shoulder. ‘I grumbled about the pressures at the time, OK? I complained endlessly about media intrusion, but I just can’t get used to not being famous any more, no fan mail, never being in the paper, not even the classical music press, and now this.’

  The rush-hour traffic, crawling towards the Westway where a huge setting sun blazed like a stop sign, looked on fascinated. A trio of workmen crammed into the front of a blue van, seeing Abby so tall, slim and wide-shouldered in Marcus’s arms; lent out and shouted: ‘Fucking poofters.’

  ‘Fucking homophobes,’ shouted back Flora, making a V-sign.

  ‘It’s only because your agents have deliberately kept you out of the public eye,’ she comforted Abby. ‘Look how deliriously excited everyone was today. Once the Press twig you’re the new Karajan, they’ll never leave you alone.’

  ‘And that’s as bad a nightmare,’ wailed Abby. ‘And I miss my Strad. It’s now being played by a bitch called Maria Kusak. I know she won’t look after it.’

  ‘I expect she’ll leave it in restaurants like I do,’ said Flora, as they rustled through plane leaves unhinged by the day’s great heat. ‘Now we could go to the Planetarium which would put everything in perspective and make us realize how infinitely trivial our lives are, but unfortunately it’s just shut, so we’re going to take you to meet a very glamorous Russian conductor.’

  ‘All Russian conductors are drunk and incompetent,’ said Abby ungratefully.

  ‘Boris is often very drunk but he’s a good conductor,’ said Marcus.

  ‘And a lot of people unaccountably think he’s a terrific composer,’ added Flora, reflecting that it couldn’t have been good for Abby’s ego, that all the people pouring out of offices stared at Marcus rather than at her.

  But Abby had stopped in her tracks.

  ‘Are you talking about Boris Levitsky who married Rachel Grant?’

  Flora nodded.

  ‘That’s weird.’ Abby was really agitated. ‘I read a piece about Rachel’s suicide. It really influenced me, right, that she could drive off a cliff, because she’d caught Boris cheating on her. After I cut my wrist,’ Abby’s voice broke, ‘I wanted to write to Boris and tell him I was sure Rachel didn’t mean to kill herself. It was just a crazy gesture to wipe out the hurt, with an even greater hurt, anything to make the pain go away.’

  ‘Tell Boris that, I’m sure it would comfort him,’ said Marcus.

  ‘Boris was very well known in Russia when I was at the Moscow Conservatoire,’ sniffed Abby later, as Marcus edged the Aston Martin through the traffic. ‘We all went to his concerts. It was a great scandal when he fell in love with Rachel and defected to the West. She was a marvellous player.’

  ‘I wasn’t a fan of hers,’ said Flora with rare coldness. ‘She was an awful bitch. You couldn’t blame Boris for straying. He used to be one of Rannaldini’s assistant conductors, and Rachel so detested the influence Rannaldini had on him that she had an affaire with Rannaldini out of spite. Took him off me to be exact, that’s probably why I hate her.’

  ‘But I thought Boris and Rachel were reconciled,’ protested Abby.

  ‘They were,’ said Flora, ‘but Rannaldini and Boris were after the same job, running the New World Symphony Orchestra in New York. Boris looked as though he was going to get it. He was young, brilliant and back with Rachel. The Scorpion caught him coming out of Chloe’s, his ex-mistress’s, flat. I’m sure Rannaldini tipped them off. Typical shitty thing he would do. Rachel saw the photograph in The Scorpion and drove off the road. Hey presto. Rannaldini, crying crocodile tears over the death of the finest pianist of her generation, lands the New York job. Can we get some drink from that off-licence, Marcus?’

  ‘We can’t stop here.’

  ‘We’ll have to stop somewhere. Boris’ll have drunk any drink he’s got. Boris was shattered by Rachel’s death,’ Flora turned back to Abby. ‘Particularly because she left him two young children to bring up. Not a great aid to composition. Despite such set-backs, Boris has had loads of women since Rachel died, men get over these things much more quickly than women, because they’re in a buyer’s market, but he still misses Rachel and feels dreadfully guilty about her. People are always giving him money to write things, then he doesn’t deliver. The Rutminster Symphony Orchestra commissioned a requiem to Rachel more than two years ago. An old duck called Sir Rodney Mackintosh—’

  ‘I’m his protégée,’ said Abby sniffily, ‘I’ve only been stopping at his house for the past two and a half years.’

  I can’t be expected to know her entire c.v., thought Flora irritated.

  ‘Rodney’s so darling,’ added Abby possessively.

  ‘Darling,’ agreed Flora. ‘So you probably know Rodney felt sorry for Boris, but again Boris has failed to deliver. Every time he picks up his chewed pencil he thinks about Rachel, starts crying and has to have another huge glass of red wine, and the RSO have to keep rescheduling.’

  ‘Boris was a great conductor,’ mused Abby.

  ‘But not especially focused. He’s going out with some big boobed Bratislavian bassoonist tonight. So Marcus and I said we’d babysit.’

  ELEVEN

  ‘Don’t mention Rannaldini,’ muttered Flora as, clinking bottles in time to the clanking of the ancient lift, they slowly climbed to the sixth floor, ‘or Boris will foam at the mouth.’

  Boris was already foaming at the mouth. Hardly concealing his manhood with a Ninja Turtle face towel, he was waving a toothbrush instead of a baton. Having opened the front door, he dived into a nearby bathroom to spit out the toothpaste. He had just had a bath and was trying to dry a pair of boxer shorts with a hair-dryer.

  Despite a sallow skin, deep-set eyes almost entirely concealed by puffiness, dark hair like an unclipped poodle and a chunky, rugger player’s body, there was an undeniable Byronic smoulder about Boris.

  Abby took one look at him, realized she was half an inch taller, kicked off her shoes and bolted to the 100 to repair her smudged eyeliner and even put on some lipgloss.

  Boris took one look at Abby and decided to give the Bratislavian bassoonist a miss. He and Abby were soon gabbling in Russian about their Moscow days.

  ‘What have you got for us to drink?’ asked Flora.

  ‘I cannot drink, I am on vagon.’ Then Boris saw the bottles Flora was taking out of an Oddbins carrier bag, ‘Oh vell, perhaps I am not.’

  Abby was even unfazed by the messiest living-room ever. It was very Russian with crimson and scarlet furniture
and gold icons on the midnight-blue walls, but every chair was piled high with clothes. The grand piano buckled under scores, covered in drink rings, and upended silver photograph frames. The dark red velvet cloth on the big table could hardly be seen for hamburger boxes and bottles wafting stale remnants of drink. On the bookshelves were half-eaten apples, overflowing ashtrays, tapes and CDs out of their cases.

  While the entire family obviously chucked their shoes and boots in one corner, the rest of the floor was littered with orange peel, pencil sharpenings, tissues and crumpled-up pieces of manuscript paper.

  ‘Oh Boris, you are a slut,’ sighed Flora. ‘Where are the children – hidden under the rubble?’

  ‘I forget to tell – the kids, they stay with friends.’

  ‘Good thing, they’ll get bubonic plague if they stay here.’

  Flora removed a curling ham sandwich from the mantelpiece.

  ‘When did you last eat?’

  ‘I verk since midnight last night,’ said Boris proudly. ‘Nearly twenty hours.’

  While Flora chided, Marcus, who was more practical, had found a black dustbin bag in the kitchen and now settled down to clear up the mess.

  ‘Where’s the stuff you’ve just written?’

  ‘I put it in the samovar for safety,’ said Boris.

  ‘Is it numbered?’ asked Marcus, retrieving it.

  ‘Not that it matters,’ Flora, who was opening bottles, murmured to Abby. ‘Play it back to front, upside-down, it wouldn’t make any difference.’ She blew a kiss at Boris.

  ‘Let me see,’ said Abby reverently.

  Marcus held out a manuscript page covered in a mass of black corrections.

  ‘Looks as though a lot of centipedes have been doing the Highland Fling after a mud bath,’ said Flora. ‘Why can’t you use a rubber instead of crossing out?’

  ‘Because eef my first thought was best, eef I rub it out, it is gone.’

  ‘How can anyone copy that?’ grumbled Flora.

  ‘I can,’ said Marcus, removing the pages to the safety of his music case.

  ‘Vot does eet sound like?’

  ‘I’ll try and play it later when I’ve tidied up this dump.’

  ‘What a wonderful wife you’ll make someone.’ Flora lobbed some orange peel at Marcus’s black bag and missed. ‘If you want to make yourself useful,’ she said to Abby, ‘go and wash up four glasses. Abby had a dazzling début as a conductor,’ she was telling Boris as Abby returned with an assortment of mugs, cups and even a small vase.

  ‘Ear is the only theeng that matter,’ said Boris, filling them all up to the top. ’Ear and rhythm, telling the orchestra how and ven to play. A conductor must learn what is possible to ask, then ask the orchestra ten times more. He must also come into a room at any time and command attention.’

  ‘“You have that in your countenance which I would fain call master,” or rather maestro,’ quoted Flora, settling down to sort out the mountain of newspapers thrown down by the fireplace.

  ‘What piece did you do?’ asked Boris.

  ‘Bartók’s Viola Concerto.’

  ‘Ah,’ Boris gave a theatrical sigh and drained his glass. ‘Bartók is like me. His last Christmas he could never leave hees flat because he was so ashamed he had no money to tip lift man.’

  ‘Bartók had security till he was eight, then his father died like mine did,’ said Abby, taking a huge gulp of red wine.

  ‘He was Aries like me,’ said Flora.

  ‘Like mine, his genius was never recognized.’ Boris was near to tears. ‘He die in poorness like I shall.’

  ‘If you gave up drink and worked a bit harder, you’d be very rich,’ said Flora, tipping a pile of Guardians into Marcus’s dustbin bag. ‘Oh look, here’s your hairbrush, that must have been missing for months.’

  Removing it from the pile, Flora sat down on the arm of Boris’s chair and started to brush his wild curls.

  ‘My music reflects the chaos of our times.’

  ‘I don’t know why you don’t save time and programme this flat instead.’

  Ignoring her, Boris topped up Abby’s glass. ‘I am sorry about your wrist. I have all your records. Vil you play again?’

  ‘My physio thinks so, but I still can’t grip the neck of a violin and my fingers can’t get around the strings.’

  ‘Eet is same, I ’ave music bursting to get out of my head, but I cannot write.’

  ‘It’s not the same at all,’ reproved Flora. ‘You can still move a pencil. Don’t be a drama queen.’

  ‘Ouch,’ said Boris, as she tugged at a tangle at the back. ‘What’s got into you?’

  ‘I am sick of an old passion. Christ, you’ve got chewing-gum here.’

  ‘I wanted to tell you, Boris.’ Lowering her voice Abby broke into Russian again, obviously talking about Rachel because soon they were both crying and wiping each other’s eyes and pouring out more glasses of red.

  ‘Summit meeting between the super powers,’ said Flora drily, as Marcus returned with a second dustbin bag.

  Beautiful red-and-blue patterned rugs were beginning to emerge on the floor and a gold-and-blue embroidered shawl on the piano where Marcus was righting the silver-framed photographs of the old days in Moscow: children on toboggans, grannies with swept-up hair, the young Boris with Prokofiev and Shostakovich.

  ‘That vas my Rachel,’ Boris pointed to a photograph of a beautiful but disapproving-looking woman. ‘She vas a saint.’

  ‘She was a crosspatch,’ said Flora, getting a black velvet toggle out of her trouser pocket to tie back Boris’s curls. Finally she brushed his wild eyebrows.

  ‘There, Mel Gibson.’ She kissed the tip of his nose.

  ‘How many voices are you scoring the Requiem for?’ asked Abby.

  ‘None,’ said Boris flatly. ‘The instruments play the voices. The RSO chorus is full of squawking amateurs and Hermione Harefield wanted to sing soprano part. So I stop them all. I ’ate singers.’

  Returning to the pile through which she was making slow progress because she kept stopping to read things, Flora was now brandishing an unstamped postcard with a charging bison on the back.

  ‘Why are you writing to Edith Spink?’

  ‘She send tape of concert of my Berlin Vall Symphony she did in Vest Country. It sound so ‘orrible, I write telling her never to play my vork again. I vondered vot happen to that postcard, geeve it to me.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Flora tore up the postcard and chucked it into Marcus’s black bag. ‘Edith’s a good egg. When Rannaldini blocked my scholarship to the Academy, she put in a good word. You’re stupid to upset her, Boris, she’s on your side.’

  ‘Not ven she play my music like that. I shall have to go back to teaching.’

  ‘You can’t, you hated teaching,’ said Flora sensibly. ‘All those staff meetings about handles on lavatory doors, all the fuss when you wanted time off to go to performances, let alone rehearsals. And you can’t compose if you have to write lectures. You’ve got to finish, Rachel’s Requiem.’

  ‘I never meet a deadline or an honest woman,’ said Boris sulkily.

  ‘That’s bloody rude when I’ve given you the benefit of my advice. Christ,’ Flora pulled out a sheaf of brown envelopes, ‘don’t you ever pay bills?’

  ‘Not if I can’t pay them. I cannot buy my kids clothing, I cannot redecorate my flat. Look at the damp.’ Boris pointed to a dark stain above the window.

  ‘You’ll be able to paper it with brown envelopes,’ said Flora, ‘Here’s one from the Danish National Ballet – surely you don’t owe them any money?’

  Opening the envelope Flora triumphantly shook out a cheque for thirty thousand kroners which Boris held up to the light in ecstasy.

  ‘It’s for ballet they want me to write about Little Mermaid.’

  ‘That’s terrific,’ said Abby excitedly. ‘You’ll get repeats every time anyone wants to do it and they can sell videos and tapes in the foyer.’

  Boris, whose melancholy alternate
d with raging high spirits, became quite expansive at the prospect of relative riches. Normally he, Flora and Marcus would have played chamber music into the small hours but desisted in deference to Abby.

  ‘What are your plans?’ he asked her.

  ‘Take the course at the Academy. I’ve familiarized myself with loads of scores in Lucerne, now I need practise. I’ll take any gig offered.’

  Having tidied up as much of the sitting-room as possible, Marcus was wheezing so badly from the dust that he had to retreat to the kitchen, resort to a couple of puffs from his inhaler, and sit down for ten minutes, hunched over the kitchen table to recover his breath. Then he started on supper. There was only a certain amount of his day that he could cope with other people. He needed to be alone now to think about next week’s concert.

  Finding a lot of eggs of dubious antiquity, some rockhard Gruyère and some big tomatoes, he decided to make cheese omelettes and tomato salad. There was no vinegar so he used the juice of a wrinkled lime and brought a loaf out of retirement by turning it into garlic bread.

  Rubbing the Gruyère up and down the grater until the curls of cheese had over-flowed the bowl, he studied the Chopin, humming and making notes.

  ‘Need a top-up?’ It was Abby with a bottle.

  Marcus shook his head.

  She looked much better than she had earlier. There was a sparkle in her eyes and colour in her cheeks.

  ‘My, that’s good,’ Abby pinched a bit of tomato out of the salad bowl. ‘Who taught you to cook?’

  ‘My stepmother.’

  ‘The divine Taggie,’ teased Abby. ‘Hermione Harefield said she wasn’t a woman of substance.’

  ‘She’s the most s-s-ubstantial person I know,’ stammered Marcus furiously. ‘She’s b-b-eautiful and k-kind and she’s the only woman who’s ever made my father happy. That bitch Hermione’s just jealous.’

  ‘I told you to keep your trap shut, Abby,’ said Flora, appearing in the doorway.

  After supper, leaving the others to drink and gossip, Marcus settled down to play the piano. Boris’s flat was on the second floor of a four-sided block which looked out on to a square of garden dominated by a huge golden catalpa.