Appassionata

by Jilly Cooper

  Hilary’s best friend was ostensibly Juno Meadows, but they enjoyed a spiky relationship, Hilary envying Juno’s fragile beauty and her acquisition of Viking, and Juno envious of Hilary’s minor public-school background and her acquisition of Lionel, who as leader, outranked Viking. Much of their conversation revolved round whether Juno would reform Viking, or Lionel leave Miriam. Hilary prided herself on being better at sex, cooking and cherishing than Miriam. She would set her alarm for 3 a.m. so she could listen to Lionel playing the Kreutzer Sonata on the World Service.

  Hilary had a cottage outside Rutminster which Lionel visited on the way to and from work, but unlike Viking he didn’t pay the mortgage, having a large one of his own already. As a result Hilary was very tight with money, never buying a drink and always taking the manilla envelope round to collect for leaving presents, so no-one would realize she hadn’t put in any money.

  The departing Hugo had been much-loved, and Hilary collected enough money to buy him some new yellow cords, a pair of waterproof trousers and a symbolic gym slip and hockey stick, because he was defecting to join the Headmistress’s team in Cotchester.

  His leaving party, in Close Encounters Wine Bar near the cathedral, was extremely wild. Viking and Dixie brought the house down with a touching rendition of ‘The Lost Cords’. Canon Airlie, taking a midnight stroll with his Welsh terrier, Trigger, was appalled to see a shrieking schoolgirl with only a hockey stick for protection being chased across the Close by the Celtic Mafia and a large barking black dog. The schoolgirl was then stripped of her gym slip and thrown into the River Fleet. Rushing to her rescue, the Canon nearly suffered a coronary on being confronted by a thick hairy chest and worse, as Hugo emerged laughing uproariously, bellowing French expletives, from the foam.

  Abby had not been invited to the party – ‘You’re management now, duckie’ – but heard the sounds of revelry as she leant wistfully out of the Lord Byron Suite, breathing in the smell of white lilac and newly mown grass, and praying that one day she would be accepted.

  But no-one could accuse Abby of cowardice. Her first job was to sort out the RSO.

  ‘I know you’re all desperately underpaid and hungover,’ she told them with a smile the following morning.

  The orchestra, green to the gills, did not smile back.

  ‘And I’m going to push for more bucks for you,’ went on Abby. ‘But not until you play better. You’ve got sloppy and lazy and there are too many players not pulling their weight: faking or being protected by their colleagues.’

  She then produced the bombshell that she wanted the entire orchestra to re-audition behind a screen and in front of a listening panel in the American fashion.

  ‘So no bias against women, foreigners, young or old, black or white, can creep in. This won’t mean mass sackings, we can’t afford it.’ Abby smiled again at the orchestra who glared back stonily. ‘I just want to locate the bad apples.’

  ‘We could start with you,’ shouted the bullying, brickred faced First Trumpet, Carmine Jones.

  Miles Brian-Knowles, the general manager, who was already cross with Abby because she claimed she was too busy to meet and charm any sponsors, was absolutely furious.

  ‘You can’t sack anyone, it’s not just the money, the unions won’t let us, and any musician fed up with working in London is far too expensive.’

  The board, however, supported Abby, as did one of her few fans, the stage manager, Tony Charlton, known as ‘Charlton Handsome’. Charlton was a larky boy, who looked almost as good in jeans as Viking, and resented the fact that the Celtic Mafia creamed off the prettiest groupies after concerts.

  ‘They’re a lot of prima donnas, Abby, you stick to your guns,’ he encouraged her as he rehung the dusty brown velvet curtains across the board room to provide a screen, and turned the big mahogany table sideways. He then lined up chairs on the far side for a listening panel, which would consist of Abby, Miles, relevant section leaders when they weren’t auditioning themselves, and Miss Priddock with a list of numbers for each member of the orchestra to be ticked off ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ after they’d played.

  Most stretched of all by the event was Nicholas Digby, the incredibly harassed orchestral manager. Nicholas had an anguished face, ginger hair falling like Saluki’s ears on either side of a very bald cranium and looked rather like Mr Pinch in Martin Chuzzlewit. One of his many jobs, along with providing complimentary tickets, and seeing the soloists’ dressing-rooms were all right, was getting the correct number of musicians on and off the stage for every concert. He had a nervous breakdown every winter finding extras when the RSO were laid low with flu.

  He now had the thankless task of feeding members of the orchestra one by one in to the board room and attempting to preserve their anonymity by stopping them speaking.

  ‘Leave off your aftershave, and stump in in Doc Martens,’ Dixie advised Randy. ‘And they’ll assume you’re a woman and pass you automatically.’

  Sections varied in size in the RSO. Lionel, as well as leading the orchestra, presided over thirteen first violins. Peter Plumpton, First Flute, on the other hand, only had the Steel Elf and an occasional piccolo player to boss. Section leaders, or principals as they were known, were responsible for the various problems within the section, stopping personality clashes, deciding who should sit where and next to whom, generally improving the sound.

  They also tended to shield bad players. Barry, the Principal Bass, a grey-haired giant with a gypsy’s face, who came from a rock band, had an old boy, known as ‘El Squeako’, in his section. El Squeako, who relied on his double bass to hold him up, had a hearing-aid which frequently let off eldritch squeaks during the most intimate pianissimo, reducing the entire orchestra to hysterical giggles. Somehow El Squeako had to be nursed past the listening panel.

  It was a matter of pride for Viking to get all his section through. His only worry was Old Cyril, the Fourth Horn, whose lips and teeth had gone so he couldn’t centre the notes any more, and who drank too much out of nerves and despair.

  Once a great player and friend of Dennis Brain, Old Cyril always wore a tie and a jacket to rehearsals, sat up straight, was polite to everyone, loved his garden and Miss Priddock for the thirty years he had been with the orchestra.

  Viking knew he ought to take the old boy aside and tell him he was holding the section back, but Cyril had looked after Viking when he joined the orchestra eight years ago. He would never survive if he were fired and had to eke out an existence teaching, and Viking wasn’t going to dump him now. Cyril, however, hadn’t helped himself by downing beer after beer in the Shaven Crown on the day of the auditions.

  By lunch-time, Abby had reached screaming pitch. Why in hell had she started the beastly thing? If she heard another Mozart concerto murdered, she’d go ballistic. She’d forgotten, too, how terrifying auditions were for players. With throats constricting, fingers stiffening, tongues tying, and breath shortening to nothing, it was worse than ironing someone else’s silk shirt.

  Number Thirty-Nine, who’d just come in, played exquisitely for three minutes before launching into a flurry of wrong notes and bursting into tears.

  Appalled, Abby jumped up, pushing the brown velvet curtains apart, to find Little Jenny, the round-faced baby of the orchestra who sat at the back of the Second Violins.

  ‘You did great,’ Abby put her arm round Jenny’s heaving shoulders. ‘We all thought you were a far more experienced player. Of course you’re through. Go and have a large drink.’

  ‘It was your idea to audition everyone,’ said Lionel nastily as Abby flopped back into her chair.

  ‘We better all go to lunch and cool down,’ said Miles primly.

  Abby, who was not remotely hungry, went in search of Jenny’s section leader, Mary Melville, known as ‘Mary-the-Mother-of-Justin’, because she was absolutely bats about her baby son. Abby wanted to tell Mary how good Jenny had been and that she ought to play at a desk nearer the front.

  The band room acted as a sitt
ing-room where musicians dumped their instruments, ate their packed lunches and relaxed when they weren’t needed in a piece of music. As well as low sofas, chairs and tables, there was a ping-pong table, a notice-board and a small bar at the far end, providing bacon sandwiches, hot dogs and soft drinks, tea and coffee.

  The room fell silent as Abby entered.

  ‘I’m looking for Mary.’

  ‘Gone shopping,’ said Clarissa, Principal Cello, who apologized for speaking with her mouth full and, to everyone else’s horror, invited a pathetically grateful Abby to join her for a cup of coffee.

  Clarissa, like Charlton Handsome, was another of Abby’s supporters. She admired her as a great player and, as the mother of three with a husband out of work, Clarissa was always too worried about paying the mortgage and the school fees and scurrying from teaching jobs to cabal and bitch with the rest of the orchestra.

  Slumping down on one of the uncomfortable olive-green sofas, trying to ignore the hostility all around, Abby was amazed to see Viking, who normally went to the Shaven Crown at lunch-time with the Celtic Mafia, unenthusiastically eating cottage cheese between two pieces of Ryvita.

  Beside him the Steel Elf was looking at colour charts.

  ‘This room is terrible,’ she glared up at walls painted a vile shade of hen’s diarrhoea green. ‘Why don’t we all pitch in and rag and drag it a nice peach one weekend?’

  ‘Needs some decent pictures,’ said Viking, not looking up from Viz.

  ‘Perhaps we should commission a portrait of our new musical director,’ said Hilary, who had her back to Abby.

  ‘Won’t be here long enough,’ said Juno bitchily.

  ‘Ignore them,’ whispered Clarissa, returning from the bar with two cups of coffee.

  ‘Thanks,’ whispered back Abby. ‘What’s Viking doing here?’

  ‘Dixie has a tenner on at 100-1 that Juno will kick Viking out before the end of April,’ murmured Clarissa, picking up the black tights she was darning, ‘so it’s in his interest to lead Viking astray.

  ‘On Sunday, Viking was supposed to be putting up shelves. Dixie lured him out to the pub and Viking didn’t get back till midnight. Madam was hopping,’ Clarissa lowered her voice even further, ‘and has refused to sleep with Viking unless he stops drinking and carousing, and he has.’

  ‘My God, for how long?’

  ‘About forty-eight hours.’

  Viking, meanwhile, was trying to look as though he was enjoying cauliflower florets and Vegemite sandwiches.

  ‘What did you put in for Nugent?’

  ‘Nothing, I keep saying dogs should only be fed once a day. With the warmer weather, he can soon sleep outside. What d’you think of that colour for our bedroom, Victor?’

  ‘Onspeakable. Nugent will not sleep outside,’ he handed Nugent half his sandwich, which Nugent promptly spat out, regarding it as no substitute for his own shepherd’s pie at the pub.

  ‘Any chocolate biscuits?’ asked Viking.

  Juno cut a grapefruit in half and handed one part to Viking with a plastic spoon and a napkin. ‘Here’s your dessert.’

  ‘Some achieve grapefruit, some have grapefruit thrust upon them,’ sighed Viking. ‘Oh Christ.’

  Old Cyril had come in, cannoning off both sides of the band room door before collapsing hiccuping on a sofa, gazing out unseeingly at the chestnut candles tossing in the park.

  He was followed by Mary-the-Mother-of-Justin, angelic face flushed with excitement over the photos she had just picked up from Boots.

  ‘This is Justin.’ She brandished a photograph of a gorgeous two year old in front of Abby and Clarissa.

  ‘Gorgeous,’ sighed Abby. ‘And that’s darling of you and him.’

  ‘I expect my husband’ll put that one in his wallet,’ Mary said happily.

  ‘You don’t have a photograph of me in your wallet, Victor,’ nagged Juno.

  ‘Haven’t got a wallet,’ said Viking, who was returning from the bar with a cup of black coffee for Cyril and a Penguin for Nugent.

  ‘Haven’t got any money either.’

  Neither Covent Garden nor the London Met had yet paid him and Juno’s mortgage was eating into his salary.

  Hearing guffaws from the window, he swung round. It was Dixie and Randy grinning and red faced from the pub.

  ‘We’ve bought you a box of After Eights, Victoria dear, to round off your slap-up meal.’

  Viking auditioned in the middle of the afternoon, and he mobbed the whole thing up. Somehow he had persuaded the pianist to play a piece of music more suited to a strip club. The listening panel pursed their lips and looked even more disapproving when, after a couple of bars from the French horn, a lacy black bra flew over the brown velvet curtains, followed in leisurely succession by fishnet stockings, scarlet satin garters and, finally, a purple G-string, which landed on the shiny board-room table in front of Abby.

  Abby’s cries of ‘This is obnoxious,’ were then drowned by Don Juan’s horn call, before Viking launched into the love duet from Ein Heldenleben, establishing no doubt as to his identity.

  Sauntering out, he left a note on his chair: ‘Please leave this seat as you would find it,’ for Randy Hamilton, who laughed so much he could hardly play.

  ‘Fuck,’ Randy said, after the tenth wrong note.

  ‘Shut up, you are not allowed to speak,’ hissed a sweating Nicholas, who was supposed to be calling out players’ numbers to the listening panel as he fed them in.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Randy for a second time, so distracting Nicholas, that Blue, plus horn, was able to slide into the board room unnoticed, and hide in a big cupboard in the corner.

  Thus, when a swaying Cyril was posted in by Viking, and Nicholas had called out his number, fifty-five, Blue put his horn to his lips and played the horn solo from A Midsummer Night’s Dream so beautifully, the panel halted him after a couple of minutes.

  ‘That’s fine,’ Abby turned to Miss Priddock. ‘Put a “yes” to Number Fifty-Five.’

  ‘Definitely,’ agreed Lionel and Miles.

  The next moment, to their horror, a beaming Cyril staggered through the curtains, solemnly shook hands with them all, blew a kiss to Miss Priddock and tottered out.

  Miles and Lionel and Abby were all furious, but not so cross as Quinton Mitchell, Viking’s Third Horn, who threatened to sneak to the panel about Blue’s playing instead of Cyril.

  ‘I have to sit next to the drunken old bugger,’

  ‘If you breathe a word,’ Viking seized Quinton’s lapels, ‘I’ll tell Mrs Mitchell exactly who you were op to at Hugo’s leaving party.’

  ‘Fifty-Six,’ shouted Nicholas.

  The piano started playing, a few seconds later a flute joined in.

  Lionel and Miles stared fixedly at their notes. Abby felt as though steel nails were being drilled through her head. A wave of vindictiveness overwhelmed her.

  ‘That’s enough warming up,’ she shouted a few minutes later. ‘We’re pushed for time, right, can you get started.’

  There was a pause, then a furious squeaky little voice said: ‘I’ve just played the slow movement of Poulenc’s Flute Sonata.’

  Abby shook off Miles’s restraining hand.

  ‘Can you come through?’

  Anger made Juno look even more enchanting, putting a rare warmth in her cold eyes.

  ‘It’s no good, Juno,’ said an unrepentant Abby. ‘I guess you’d better look for another job, you’re just not up to it.’

  ‘I was good enough for your predecessor,’ hissed Juno and stormed out.

  ‘That was very unwise,’ smirked Lionel.

  ‘Wonderfully lyrical,’ he murmured mistily a minute later, as Hilary, whom he’d coached between bonks last night, started paddling laboriously through the slow movement of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto.

  She was interrupted, however, by Viking, barging in without knocking, all slitty eyes and blazing Irish rage.

  ‘How dare you sack Juno?’ he yelled at Abby.

  ‘
S-s-she’s useless, she must have slept with someone to get that job.’

  ‘She’s sleeping with me, and if she goes, I go.’

  And in barged Blue.

  ‘If Viking goes, I go.’

  And in marched Dixie and Randy.

  ‘And if Viking and Blue go, we go,’ they chorused.

  ‘Woof, woof, woof,’ barked Mr Nugent, bringing up the rear.

  ‘You fucking band of brothers, I don’t understand you guys,’ yelled back Abby. ‘I guessed love was blind, but I never figured it was deaf as well. I don’t know why you’re being so supportive,’ she added to Nugent. ‘Juno’ll have you out in a trice.’

  Miles, who disapproved of swearing and dogs, looked very shocked.

  As a result, the Steel Elf was reinstated but Abby had made herself an implacable enemy.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Poor Abby had such good intentions. But being musical director of the RSO continued to be an absolute nightmare. After one particularly rowdy rehearsal towards the end of April, during which Viking had peremptorily summoned the entire brass section out into the car-park to push his ancient BMW because he was late for the dentist, Abby received a summons from the manager.

  Finding Lord Leatherhead and Miles, who’d given her even less support than Lionel, awaiting her, Abby steeled herself for a wigging. Instead, they told her they had found a new managing director.

  ‘It’s George Hungerford,’ said Lord Leatherhead in tones of awe. ‘We’ve been very, very lucky.’

  Abby had no idea who George Hungerford was, and was even less impressed when they told her he was one of the few property developers who had managed to increase his fortune during the recession.

  A rough, tough Yorkshireman, who in his youth had sung bass in the great Huddersfield Choral Society, George had always fancied running an orchestra, and reckoned he could sort out the RSO in one or two days a month with his hands tied behind his back. He would take over at the beginning of May.

  All the female musicians and the secretaries on the top floor were wildly excited that he was also between marriages. ‘Gorgeous George’ as they already called him, could also be relied on to take L’Appassionata down a peg. Blood in the aisles was joyfully predicted.