Appassionata

by Jilly Cooper

  ‘Grow up, sweetheart. Alexei is about as straight as Shirley Temple’s curls.’

  ‘You’re just jealous. Don’t you dare upset him.’

  ‘Not nearly as much as Gwynneth and Gilbert have. That two broomstick family barged in onannounced as Alexei was slapping on his tenth layer of Max Factor to bring him greetings from the Arts Council of Great Britain. Alexei threw a queenie fit and started stoning them with pots of cold cream. You have to applaud the guy’s style.’

  ‘They have no understanding of the artistic temperament,’ raged Abby. ‘And I hope you and Flora are going to keep your dogs under control this evening.’

  ‘Of course, here’s one of them now,’ said Viking as Fat Isobel waddled up with a pile of evening-shirts and a white DJ on a coat-hanger.

  ‘I managed to get the mark out,’ she said adoringly.

  ‘That’s a darling girl, I’ll buy you a beer later,’ Viking pecked Isobel’s big blushing cheek.

  ‘You are so arrogant and lazy,’ said Abby furiously. ‘Why don’t you get someone to pull your toilet paper for you.’

  FIFTY

  Not a blade of grass could be seen on George’s polo field as loud speakers and huge screens waited to relay the concert to an audience any rock star would have killed for. Many of them waved Union Jacks in anticipation of the VE Day celebrations starting at midnight. In the distance Rutminster Cathedral, its spire rising out of the billowing green woods like a wizard’s hat, struck eight o’clock. Over the stage and pit hung a huge canopy like a nun’s head-dress, dark blue inside and dotted with stars to create Romeo and Juliet’s night-time Verona.

  Into the pit through a side-door trouped the RSO in their white DJs and new crimson jackets, which were already uniformly darkened by damp patches under the armpits. The younger girls had rolled back their sleeves. Nellie had undone her top three buttons. Aware that her lower half was totally hidden in the pit, Flora had undone all but the top button. Everyone’s toothpaste smiles on Miles’s instructions were totally obscured by Peggy Parker’s massive flower arrangements.

  Huddled in the front of the stalls, Marcus wished Abby had given him a less public seat. He was terrified Declan, his father’s great friend, would notice him and seek him out later. Even worse, on his right in a white shirt already covered with chocolate, a bow-tie and shorts of bottle-green velvet, wriggled two-and-half-year-old Justin propped up by three cushions so he could see Mary, his mother, at the front desk of the Second Violins. Marcus liked children but reduced to jelly at the prospect of meeting Alexei at the party later, he was driven demented by Justin’s incessant and often incomprehensible prattle. Johnno, his father, demoralized by four months out of work, wearing a crumpled light-weight suit which Mary hadn’t had time to iron, didn’t seem much of a disciplinarian.

  ‘So good to see little ones brought early to the sacred fountain,’ said Gwynneth, who clearly didn’t believe in deodorants, and who, to Marcus’s horror, was sitting on his left.

  She was wearing vast silver earrings in the shape of ballet shoes in deference to Alexei, but was now furious because he’d hit her on the nipple with ajar of moisturizer and a large pot of cleansing cream had landed on Gilbert’s sandalled toe.

  ‘Gilbert’s bound to lose the nail.’

  And half a ton of Rutminster dirt beneath it will be homeless, thought Marcus with a shudder.

  ‘I’d sue. Nemerovsky can afford it,’ said Peggy Parker who was massive in maroon on Gilbert’s left.

  She was livid because Sonny hadn’t been given a slot in the gala, and her flowers on the platform hadn’t got a large enough plug in the programme.

  To tumultuous applause Abby swept on looking dramatic, but definitely OTT in a purple tunic and floppy trousers. Influenced by Byron in the Old Bell, she had added a white turban secured with an amethyst pin.

  ‘Abby just wash her hair,’ piped up Justin.

  ‘Where’s Jemima, Imran?’ shouted the husband of one of Rutminster’s new Labour councillors, who’d never been to a concert before, and who was already plastered on George’s champagne.

  The audience tittered. Abby gritted her teeth. She’d have had no problem carrying off the turban if Viking hadn’t called her Ghandi Pandy in the wings.

  Checking that Venturer Television and Classic FM were rolling, she brought down her stick.

  Cathie Jones, still ashen with fear despite the punishing heat of the pit, played the solo quite exquisitely in Roman Carnival. In fact everything was fizzing along splendidly until Abby discovered Flora’s goddamned dog had chewed up the last pages of the score, so she had to pretend to be turning earlier pages not to unnerve the orchestra. Not that she could see anything anyway because of the sweat cascading down from under her turban.

  She couldn’t even yell at Flora for Trevor’s misdemeanour because Flora’s mother was on next. Ravishing in plunging coffee coloured lace, her red curls half piled up, half trailing down her freckled suntanned back, Georgie was soon belting out Mozart and Puccini as effortlessly as Gershwin. After years of smoking and far from light drinking, her voice was not perfect but it had exuberance and enormous charm.

  ‘Some day he’ll come along, the man I love,’ sang Georgie.

  He already has, thought Marcus helplessly.

  ‘You have to admit my mother is a total star,’ muttered Flora to Fat Isobel.

  It was time for Peter and the Wolf and Declan O’Hara, shaggy, noble and streaming with sweat like a Newfoundland dog just emerged from the sea. Being a true pro, he had spent hours perfecting the timing and, being Declan, he cried in all the sad bits and milked every dramatic effect for the television cameras.

  Entranced, hypnotized, Marcus listened to the dark reverberating Irish voice: ‘Brave boys like he are not afraid of wolves.’

  Oh but I am, sighed Marcus.

  ‘Just then a big grey wolf did come out of the forest’ went on Declan, narrowing his eyes and dramatically echoing Alexei in the Ivy.

  Who else but Viking could play the wicked wolf? thought Abby furiously as she cued in the three horns.

  Finally after the catching of the wolf and the triumphant procession, Declan came to the dreadful ending.

  ‘And if you were to listen carefully you could hear the duck quacking in the wolf’s belly because the wolf in his hurry had swallowed her alive.’

  Even when the orchestra had pelted up the scale in the final tutti, the audience were totally silent for a few shocked seconds before they erupted into a storm of applause.

  Justin, who’d been listening enraptured, broke into noisy sobs.

  ‘What happened to the duck, what happened to the poor duck?’

  ‘Of course, the whole thing’s political,’ said Gilbert sententiously. ‘The duck is meant to represent the dissident Russian artists imprisoned by Stalin.’

  ‘If they all behaved as badly as Boris and Nemerovsky,’ said Peggy Parker, with a sniff, ‘Ay think Stalin had a point.’

  Hurriedly, Marcus wiped away the tears. Couldn’t everyone detect his longing for Alexei, quacking like the duck inside him, even though he was nightly enveloped by Abby’s passion?

  He was glad when the birds started singing in the pale green trees during the interval, restoring normality. From the sloping woods on either side rose tier on tier of starry, wild garlic, its pungent smell mingling with lilac and soapy hawthorn making it increasingly difficult for him to breathe.

  Glancing into the audience as she and Declan took a final call, Abby was touched to see Marcus’s face still wet with tears. He loved her so much and felt things so deeply. After the gala they would have more time.

  In fact the only blot on a perfect evening for Abby continued to be Viking. Incensed to be confined to a pit where he couldn’t be gazed at or ogle every girl in the stalls, he had rigged up a driving mirror on the front of his music-stand so he could watch Georgie and Declan and no doubt later gaze up Evgenia’s skirt.

  Worse was to come. After Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, Georg
ie returned to sing two of Strauss’s Four Last Songs, before starting the VE Day numbers.

  Locked in Georgie’s dressing-room, Trevor stopped howling and decided if he took a Nemerovsky leap he could land on a chair and then take another leap onto the table underneath the open window.

  Mr Nugent, on the other hand, had been allowed to wait in the wings, front paws together, gazing lovingly down at his master in the pit, trying not to interrupt his beautiful horn solo by panting. Suddenly Nugent stiffened and gave a muffled growl. His enemy Trevor was jauntily approaching from the other side of the stage, only pausing to lift his leg on one of Peggy Parker’s flower arrangements, fox-brown eyes searching everywhere for Flora. The audience nudged each other in ecstasy. Recognizing Flora’s mother, who’d given him chewstiks and cold beef, Trevor bounded forward, wagging his curly tail.

  ‘Long by the roses,’ sang Georgie with clasped hands, ‘she lingers yearning for peace.’

  No-one was going to get any peace with Trevor around. Suddenly he clocked another enemy, Abby, waving a stick at eye-level, and proceeded to yap noisily, increasing in volume when Abby refused to throw the stick and even hissed at him to eff off.

  All this was too much for Nugent. Shuffling out onto the stage on his belly, he attempted to round Trevor up and off the stage. Affronted, Trevor flew at Nugent’s throat, catching mostly shaggy black fur. Nugent was normally the most pacific of dogs, but dignity offended, he weighed in, and furious growling was relayed by speakers all over the ground as though every hound in hell had been unleashed.

  In fits of laughter and with great presence of mind, Georgie grabbed Peggy Parker’s nearest flower vase and emptied three hundred pounds’ worth of lilies over Trevor and Nugent, who took absolutely no notice. There was no alternative but for a cringing Viking to clamber onto the stage and separate them. The crowd, already in stitches, were then treated to the edifying sight of the hero of the RSO in a beautifully pressed cream dinner-jacket and snow-white evening-shirt and, because he hadn’t expected his lower half to be seen in the pit, torn espadrilles and boxer shorts covered in fornicating frogs. What really upset Viking was that he hadn’t had time to brown his white legs. To a chorus of jeers and wolf-whistles he grabbed both dogs.

  ‘Come off it, ye basstards.’ And then, because Trevor was appropriately hanging on like a pit bull, Viking kicked him sharply in the ribs.

  ‘Don’t you hurt my dog, you fucking bully.’

  The next moment Flora, who also hadn’t expected anyone to see her lower half, wearing only her crimson jacket flapping loose from its top button, and a patriotic pair of Union Jack knickers, had joined him on stage to more screams of laughter and roars of applause.

  ‘Talk about the black hole of “Oh Calcutta,”’ yelled Dixie.

  ‘Drop, Trevor, drop,’ screamed Flora, kicking Nugent as hard as she could with her bare feet.

  ‘Who’s the great fucking bully now?’ shouted Viking.

  Only when Georgie, who was now even more hysterical with laughter than the audience, emptied the contents of another flower vase over both dogs and their owners, did Trevor release his grip. Whereupon Flora, clutching her dog like a furiously yapping handbag, and Viking frantically examining Nugent’s face and shoulders for gashes, continued to hurl abuse at each other, until George Hungerford marched on hissing: ‘Get those fooking dogs off stage at once,’ and seized the microphone to deafening cheers. He tried to diffuse the situation quickly by apologizing both to Georgie and the crowd.

  ‘I’m afraid everyone, including pooches, gets overwrought in this heat.’

  In agreement Trevor peered round Flora’s arm and growled furiously at Nugent. Another great cheer went up:

  ‘What a dreadful, dreadful circus,’ said Gilbert appalled.

  ‘Thank goodness Sonny’s out of it, Peggy,’ said Gwynneth patting Peggy Parker’s hand.

  Georgie seized the microphone.

  ‘It’s all my fault,’ she told the audience, ‘Trevor belongs to Flora, my daughter, who plays in the orchestra.’

  ‘Oh Mum.’ Departing Flora clutched her head with the hand that wasn’t clutching Trevor.

  ‘He’s a rescued dog, and clearly felt insecure locked up in my dressing-room,’ went on Georgie, ‘but he rescued me, I was having hellish problems with that Strauss song, so let’s get on with VE Day.’

  Trevor and Nugent were soon forgotten. The sun set in a ball of flame. The polo field became a mass of waving Union Jacks as Georgie started belting out: ‘Roll out the Barrel’, ‘We’ll Meet Again’ and ‘There’ll be Blue Birds Over The White Cliffs of Dover’ until Declan joined her on stage, taking it in turns to dry each other’s eyes.

  ‘We really ought to be singing “The Rising of the Moon” to strike a balance,’ murmured Declan. Finally they brought the house down with ‘The Lambeth Walk’.

  After a dressing down from George that neither of them would ever forget, Viking and Flora slunk back into the pit. Trevor and Nugent were now in the care of Harve the Heavy.

  ‘And if I get any more trouble out of you,’ George roared at Flora, ‘he’ll feed that bloody little dog of yours to my Rottweilers.’

  Great jubilation resulted when it was relayed over the loud speakers that Rannaldini and Hermione had netted only half the RSO’s audience that night. The moment the Opera Gala was over, members of the audience had raced over from Cotchester and were already climbing trees, or crushing the wild garlic as they crept down through the woods, to catch a glimpse of the great Nemerovsky.

  George, however, had a huge problem on his hands. Evgenia made up and ravishing in old rose chiffon, her dark hair embroidered with pearls and gold ribbon, had been ready for an hour. But Alexei was refusing to come out of his dressing-room. Not only had he insulted Gilbert and Gwynneth and blacked the eye of a Scorpion reporter who’d tried, through his dressing-room window, to do a Trevor in reverse, but he’d taken a passionate dislike to Miles.

  ‘Are you ready to dance, Mr Nemerovsky?’

  ‘No, I am not ready to dance, fuck off.’

  ‘Of course he’s not ready,’ said Viking scornfully, ‘fake tan takes at least eight hours to work.’

  ‘You should know,’ hissed Abby.

  Convinced she was the only person who could coax Alexei out, she had been bitterly humiliated when he’d dispatched her as summarily as everyone else.

  The concert was already running an hour late, which so far had only increased the bar takings and the anticipation. But Abby’s head would be on the block if Alexei didn’t deliver.

  Outside Alexei’s dressing-room, George’s resolve was stiffened by the sight of Evgenia next door. Slumped on the floor in her beautiful dress, stretching and leaning forward to keep herself supple, smoking too many cigarettes, then cleaning her teeth till her gums bled because Alexei hated the smell of smoke, attacking increasing beads of sweat with a huge powder puff, she had been driven ragged by the delay and by Alexei’s monumental selfishness. The longer the wait, the greater the entrance.

  Knocking on Alexei’s door, ignoring the snarl to fuck off, George went in.

  ‘We need to start, Alexei.’

  Alexei’s belongings: track-suit bottoms, towels, books, tapes, shoes spilled out of suitcases all over the floor. Fully made up, wearing his wolf-coat over his Romeo costume of white tights and floppy green transparent shirt, Alexei shivered convulsively as he listened to Britten’s War Requiem on his walkman for the fifth time that day.

  And George was suddenly reminded of a ram who’d strayed off the moors into his nan’s parlour, during a bitterly cold winter, who had knocked over all the furniture and the knick-knacks, reducing the room to a shambles before leaping straight out through the big sash-window.

  George had never forgotten the combined terror and ferocity of that ram and looking at Alexei, he realized he wasn’t bloody minded, just shit-scared.

  ‘Always eet is same, why do I put ass on the line? No-one who doesn’t dance, understand the cold sweat,
the fear.’

  ‘You haven’t faced the RSO in a bad mood or Rutminster Council when you’re trying to pull a fast one,’ George tried to lighten the conversation.

  ‘Is not comparable.’ Haughtily Alexei glared at George as if he was the village idiot. ‘Will I remember the steps? Will I bore the audience? Am I too old to play Romeo?’

  In the still face, the black eyes rolled like marbles.

  ‘You’re the best in the world.’

  Alexei shrugged. ‘Is millstone, eef you are best you must always be bettair.’

  Plonking himself in the second armchair, George lit a cigar.

  ‘Please don’t smoke.’

  George hastily put it out.

  ‘When I was first married,’ he said, ‘we had no money. We saved and saved either to hear Harefield sing—’

  Alexei looked outraged. ‘That screeching beech.’

  ‘Or to see you dance. We saw you in Giselle at Covent Garden. We couldn’t afford a meal out afterwards, didn’t matter, we couldn’t have eaten anything we were so excited, we could hardly speak on the way home. It was truly the best evening of my marriage.’

  ‘That was fifteen years ago, I am old now.’ Sulkily Alexei turned to the mirror, picking up a cotton bud to tidy up a smudged eye-line. George admired the long eyelashes sweeping the slanting cheek-bones.

  ‘You’ve got a body any twenty year old would die for,’ he said humbly, patting his gut, which Juno’s diet didn’t seem to be having much effect on. He must stop sending Jessica out for Toblerone in the middle of the afternoon.

  ‘What ‘appen to your marriage?’ asked Alexei.

  ‘My wife left me.’

  ‘Silly cow.’

  Getting to his feet, Alexei put a hand on the portable barre, raised his leg till his calf brushed his ear, stretching and turning, then he wandered over to the window. Floating down from George’s silver-pillared beech trees was the first pale green foliage. Alexei broke off a twig, caressing the shiny satin leaves.

  ‘Tender as young flesh,’ he sighed. ‘Tomorrow, perhaps the day after, the leaves darken and harden and coarsen and they will never be that young again. Did you know Prokofiev was lousy ballroom dancer? He write these great ballets, but when he ask pretty young girls to dance with him, they ran away.’