Appassionata

by Jilly Cooper

  ‘That was yesterday,’ said Lionel spitefully. ‘She’s got the rags up her today.’

  Bill winced. He loathed Lionel’s coarseness. He glanced up at Abby whose face was a mask to hide her fear.

  ‘Fasten your seat-belts,’ murmured Hilary to Juno in front of her. ‘Turbulence ahead.’

  From the first note it was quite clear that Maria had totally different ideas of interpretation to Abby, and Lionel totally agreed with her. They both completely ignored Abby, as Benny had done.

  Abby tried to be accommodating, but she felt as though a great blood-blister was swelling inside her brain and she wanted to snatch back her Strad. She couldn’t bear to see it in such insensitive hands.

  The second movement was even worse. Sulking because Simon had the good tune, Maria played flatly and lazily when she came in thirty-two bars later. Abby let her scratch away for four or five pages, then aware that Lionel was deliberately holding back his First Violins, she stopped the orchestra.

  ‘Can we please start this movement again? It was too slow.’

  ‘Why not beat a bit faster,’ said Hilary rudely.

  Refusing to rise, Abby took Maria aside, suggesting a few changes. Maria snapped back that Rannaldini had warmly praised her interpretation.

  ‘Sure, sure, Maria, if you could just play with a little more passion.’

  As Abby stepped back onto the rostrum, Maria made the orchestra laugh by sticking out her tongue at Abby’s back.

  ‘OK, from the beginning of the second movement,’ Abby gave the up beat, nodding at the bassoons who played A and F followed by an octave from the horns, before Simon came in with the rest of the woodwind. Simon looked as though he were in a trance, sucking his reed like an opium pipe, his fingers tense on the silver keys.

  To distract everyone from such a breathtakingly beautiful sound, Maria pointedly rummaged in her violin case for some rosin to give extra grip to the horsehair in her bow. As she did so, a folded page fell out of her primrose-yellow shirt, fluttering down and landing on the rostrum. But as her panic-stricken hand shot out, Abby’s black ankle-boot stamped down on the note. Abby recognized Lionel’s flamboyant scrawl.

  ‘Give it to me,’ squealed Maria, ‘you’re not supposed to read other people’s letters.’

  ‘Ignore the stupid cow and follow me,’ read Abby slowly. Then she went ballistic, hurling her score at Lionel’s glossy head.

  ‘Quick,’ hissed Carmine to Steve Smithson. ‘Get Miles and Knickers down to witness this.’

  ‘You son-of-a-bitch,’ Abby howled at Lionel. ‘You’re fired.’

  ‘Maestro, Maestro,’ Lionel retrieved her score. ‘It was only ajoke. As Maria says you really shouldn’t read other people’s letters.’

  ‘Go on, get out, get OUT.’

  Confronted by such fury, Lionel went, the picture of injured innocence. Steve, who played squash with Lionel, and was feeling well disposed towards him, promptly called out the orchestra, who all filed off into the band room.

  ‘We’ve got her,’ Steve murmured jubilantly to Lionel. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll return a vote of no confidence to the board. George, Miles, Mrs Parker, Ambrose, Canon Airlie, all want her out – they’ll be over the moon.’

  ‘At last we’ve broken her,’ said Lionel melodramatically, putting two shaking hands together in prayer. ‘And don’t you dare go back in there, Flora,’ he called out sharply, ‘or you’re fired.’

  As Randy and Dixie started an idle game of ping-pong up at the far end of the room, Viking looked up at Abby’s framed photograph, which Charlton Handsome had somewhat provocatively hung over the fireplace.

  ‘She has a lovely face,’ he quoted thoughtfully. ‘God in His mercy lend her grace.’ Then, turning to Lionel, added, ‘I don’t like conductors used as target-practice, I think we ought to discuss this rationally.’

  ‘We can’t go on like this,’ said Bill Thackery.

  Maria, who was thoroughly over-excited, said she’d never been so insulted in her life and she was very happy to add her weight to the vote against Abby.

  Left alone in the empty auditorium, Abby slumped on the rostrum. Slowly all the lights were flicked off except the one over her lectern. She accepted it was the end. She knew she had overreacted, but it would never be any good with Lionel. The thorn in her firm young flesh had proved poisonous. She would leave, not him. The Brahms had jinxed her again. So sweet was ne’er so fatal. For a second she fingered the scar on her wrist.

  Sadly she picked up the violin which Francis the Good Loser had inevitably left behind on his chair, caressing its glossy brown curves. Francis would soon be back to collect it. For a second she put it under her chin; it was still warm. Idly she tuned it.

  Then, as if in a dream, she started playing the lovely tune with which the oboe opens the second movement. Somehow, out of the black depths of her despair and the sense of utter failure, the notes came to her, first faltering, many of them wrong, the tempo very shaky, then gradually gaining in strength and beauty.

  She played it again, totally immersed in the sound and the sadness, then jumped out of her skin as, through the darkness, she heard a stealthy footstep and then the scraping of a chair. Then miraculous, like the horns of Elfland, she heard the bassoon, luminous and beautiful, echoing round the hall, then the octave on the horns, and then Simon starting the movement again. He didn’t need light, he knew it by heart. Like Orpheus, Abby had to steel herself not to look round. Then her heart leapt as she heard more footsteps and scraping chairs and the flute, the clarinet and the Second Bassoon joining in. It couldn’t be real, she must be dreaming, but someone was switching on the lights and now there was an arpeggio which could only have come from Viking, and the strings came in, which was the cue for the solo violin. Somehow her trembling hand managed to force her bow back and forth over the strings.

  Tears were streaming down her face so fast, she wouldn’t have been able to see anyway, but through some mystical inspiration the notes came back to her, as the boards squeaked with more and more footsteps. At the first tutti it was clear that half the orchestra were back in their seats. She jumped as a double bass was knocked over.

  Abby had played better technically in her life but never with such passion. As the horns and the woodwind returned to the first subject she had some wicked syncopation, six against four, but she kept her nerve, and then Viking was accompaning her, swooping divinely alongside, then Peter, sweet and ethereal, then rippling deep arpeggios on the bassoon, and the strings came in like a great flotilla guiding the returning, round-the-world sailor safely into port, until she had soared up to the final A.

  Absolutely no-one spoke or moved, as Abby stood trembling, with her head thrown back, her eyes closed as though awaiting a blow.

  ‘Bravo,’ said a voice.

  Then there was a storm of cheering and out of the corner of her eye Abby saw that the first chair was empty.

  Unable to face anyone, she jumped off the rostrum, handed Francis his violin, leapt off the stage, stumbling as she landed, then racing up the gangway, pushed through the swing doors out into the park. Seeing her face deathly pale and still wet with tears as she ran down the High Street, the shoppers parted to let her through. Cars screeched to a halt as she bolted across the road, drawn helplessly towards the lake.

  Following her in his car, Viking caught up with her as the town gave way to fields.

  ‘Well done,’ he yelled out of the window. ‘D’you want a drink?’

  But Abby was completely dazed, unable to speak, gazing at him with huge, haunted reddened eyes.

  ‘We all walked out of the union meeting,’ he said gently. ‘We were glad to get shot of the bastard, none of us liked him. You’ve won, sweetheart.’

  THIRTY-SIX

  The next morning, George Hungerford received a letter of no confidence in Lionel as leader, and upheld Abby’s decision to sack him. Hilary, Steve Smithson, Carmine, Juno, Militant Moll and Ninion (who was still smarting over Catherine Jones getting th
e big solo in Rachel’s Requiem) were the only members of the orchestra who didn’t sign.

  Although it was RSO policy that its musicians were not allowed to talk to the Press, George caught Cherub on the telephone to the Evening Standard diary.

  ‘Yes, we called Lionel the Incredible Sulk,’ he was saying in his shrill voice, ‘because he sulked all the time. What did he sulk about? Well, people nicking his hairdryer mostly. Can I think of anything nice about him? That’s a tricky one,’ Cherub scratched his blond curls and after a long silence, ‘not really . . . oh, yes I can.’

  ‘That’s enough,’ George pressed the cut-off button, then out of curiosity, asked, ‘what was the nice thing you remembered about Lionel?’

  ‘That his brother was much worse,’ said Cherub, going off into such giggles that George had to join in.

  All the same the RSO were left without a leader. The post was hastily advertised and leaders applied from all over the world. Many expected to have their air fares paid. Others crept surreptitiously into auditions hoping no-one would recognize them and sneak to their respective orchestras, or later know they had suffered the humiliation of not being offered the job. It was a laborious, expensive process. Miles and Mrs Parker, who’d lost a powerful ally in Lionel, were all for asking Hugo back. But Abby would have none of it. The sight of Hugo sleekly smirking in the leader’s chair at the Albert Hall during the CCO’s prom had convinced her she never wanted to work with him again.

  Bill Thackery, who’d acted as leader since Lionel left, put himself forward, but was rejected as too stodgily dependable and too lacking in charisma. Rodney had only employed him in the first place because he had once played cricket for Rutshire and scored centuries in the RSO’s annual needle-match against the CCO.

  Aware that she had hurt Bill, Abby had a restless night. Wandering round the garden at sunrise, leaving footprints on the dewy lawn, she realized after the long silence of the summer, a robin was singing again in the old crab-apple tree. Revelling in the sweet liquid notes, Abby was suddenly reminded of Julian Pellafacini, the kind, diplomatic, infinitely charismatic albino leader of Rannaldini’s New York Orchestra. She’d kept the letter he’d written her after she’d cut her wrist. Not caring that it was the middle of the night in America she called him at once.

  ‘Did I wake you?’

  ‘No, I have insomnia over Rannaldini. He sack everyone, I never come back from coffee-break to find the same musicians, yesterday he make me play three times alone in front of the orchestra.’

  ‘How obnoxious,’ said Abby furiously, adding hastily, ‘I’d never do that to you. Please come and lead my orchestra. We’re premiering Boris Levitsky’s Requiem in three weeks and I need you to show the strings how to play it, and in November we’re recording Winifred Trapp’s Harp Concertos.’

  ‘A wonderful composer,’ sighed Julian.

  ‘You’re the first person who’s heard of her,’ said Abby joyfully.

  ‘Rannaldini told me you were leaving.’

  ‘Not any more.’

  ‘Then I will come. My wife love England and ’ate New York.’

  ‘We will find you a house. How will you escape?’

  ‘Leave it to me.’

  Sweeping onto the platform a week later to conduct a concert version of Parsifal, Rannaldini found his orchestra crying with laughter and his leader sitting at the front desk in an emerald-green pleated dress, green high heels, a white pudding-basin hat and full make-up, and sacked him on the spot. By this time, Julian’s contract with the RSO had been signed.

  Julian arrived at the beginning of October and moved with his wife and children into a beautiful rented house in the Close paid for by the RSO. He was paid twice as much as Lionel, but he was worth every penny.

  He was so kind, so respected, so gravely charming, that he had only to clap his hands in rehearsals for everyone to shut up and listen. He agreed that Rachel’s Requiem was a masterpiece, explaining it to the more inexperienced or resistant players until everyone found themselves singing the tunes.

  The young players seemed to absorb his talent by osmosis, and Old Henry at last had someone to appreciate his stories and argue with about which quartet was Beethoven’s finest.

  Abby was appalled by Julian’s appearance when he arrived. His long straight white hair had receded, he was as black under the eyes as his dark glasses, and he had lost over twenty pounds which his thin, stork-like frame could ill afford, but gradually he stopped talking too much about Rannaldini.

  Miss Priddock was soon baking him cakes, Miss Parrott knitting him scarves, even Flora picked a lot of sloes intending to make him sloe gin, but they only gathered fluff in the fridge.

  ‘He’s terribly attractive,’ said Candy.

  ‘But far too nice to be heterosexual,’ sighed Clare.

  That was before they’d met his lovely bosomy wife, Luisa, whom he adored and who gave uproarious spaghetti-and-red-wine parties at the house in the Close on Sundays to which rank-and-file players were asked with section leaders, so relations within the orchestra improved dramatically.

  ‘To make good music,’ said Julian, ‘you need to have confidence and people you trust on either side of you.’

  ‘Julian’s a mensch,’ said Abby. ‘That’s someone with standards, a good friend, a man you are proud to know.’

  She had achieved great kudos for finding him. He also gave her confidence. She could easily have been jealous of his popularity, but he never took decisions without her, and gradually she became less aggressive and tactless, saying please and thank you, and taking people aside for a quiet word in the break rather than humiliating them in front of the entire orchestra.

  ‘I think that’s been played better in the past,’ she suggested to Jerry the Joker, after he’d made an appalling cock-up of a bassoon solo.

  ‘Yes, but not by me,’ said Jerry, to howls of laughter all round.

  Morale was so high in Julian’s first weeks that everyone was convinced his leadership had been entirely responsible for the New World and Rannaldini sweeping the board at the Gramophone Awards. They didn’t even mind that Edith Spink and the CCO had won an early music award for Purcell’s King Arthur.

  As the date for the première of Rachel’s Requiem approached, Boris, still minus Astrid, started hanging around H.P. Hall, tearful, apprehensive, aggressive by turns, changing everything.

  The rows between him and Abby were pyrotechnic.

  ‘I’m conducting this piece.’

  ‘I wrote zee bloody thing.’

  ‘You didn’t even remember you’d introduced a variation of “Rachel’s Lament” as a violin solo in the “Agnus Dei”.’

  After hearing Cathie Jones, still desperately nervous in the ‘Libera Me’, Boris went into an orgy of self-doubt and threatened to withdraw the lament altogether.

  ‘It sound immaculate in the head. Then you hear orchestra hacking through eet.’

  Fortunately, George Hungerford, who’d become a terrifying figure of menace to Boris since threatening to make him pay back his advance, had been listening unnoticed in the stalls and came up and shook Boris’s hand.

  ‘Congratulations, it was well worth waiting for.’

  Boris was so overcome he burst into tears. Abby then put on the pressure, persuading him that ‘Rachel’s Lament’ would only work if Viking played it. In the interests of art, Boris reluctantly gave in. As a result, Viking nearly got his tooth knocked out again.

  Wandering into H.P. Hall after another late-night moon-lighting, and no doubt pleasuring Astrid, he noticed Julian in the leader’s room poring over a score. Beside Julian, Viking could see lustrous black curls, and a beautiful lean body in a checked shirt and jeans. Confronted by such a delectable bottom, Viking couldn’t resist pinching it. Next moment an enraged Boris had swung round, and Viking was belting down the passage.

  ‘Sorry, sorry Boris,’ he pleaded. ‘Don’t hit me again. I’ve josst spent five hundred quid at the dentist. You’ve lost so much weight, I tho
ught you were Abby. Look,’ he went on, as Boris kept on coming, ‘Astrid wants to come back to you, she’s absolutely miserable with me.’

  ‘She is?’ Boris lowered his fist. ‘Oh my Astrid.’

  Terrific news, thought Abby, overhearing the conversation as she came out of the conductor’s room. ‘And Boris has agreed “Rachel’s Lament” sounds better on the French horn, so he’s written it back in for you,’ she told Viking.

  ‘Sweet of Boris,’ said Viking coolly, ‘but I’m flying to Glasgow tomorrow to play a Mozart concerto with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, their First Horn’s dislocated a shoulder. I cleared it with George,’ he added as Abby’s face contorted with fury.

  Blue would have killed him, reflected Viking, if he’d stolen Cathie’s solo.

  Abby could have killed him anyway. ‘And that Hugh Grant hairstyle doesn’t suit you at all,’ she yelled after his departing back view.

  The première in fact was a success. All the London critics came down for a number of reasons: Levitsky was still a name; they were curious to see how Abby was making out; but, most of all, they wanted to hear this great new leader who had graced little Rutminster with his lustre. Even the Rutshire Butcher, deliberately invited to the last rehearsal and force-fed lobster thermidor and Moët afterwards by George, wrote that it was good to have some meaty tunes after all those one-note jobs, which had dominated the classical hit-parade for so long.

  The two representatives attending from the Arts Council were positively orgasmic about the piece. Nothing got them going like 75 per cent of the audience looking bewildered. By carefully placing round the hall a number of the Friends of the Orchestra to cheer and stamp, George managed to generate a standing ovation for Boris, who looked so mournfully handsome and romantic, that the audience kept on clapping, particularly when he led Cathie Jones forward. Aware that Blue’s good-luck card was hidden in the pocket of her black dress, she had played exquisitely.

  Seeing the pink-and-orange chrysanthemums Miss Priddock was bringing on for Abby, Boris thrust them into Cathie’s rough red hands. ‘I zank you viz all my ’eart. I feel Rachel forge eve me at last.’