by Jilly Cooper
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 sitting-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 ge
t 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.
Abby was too worried about next week’s concert and her even more revolutionary plans to re-audition the entire and often frightful Rutminster Choir before the German Requiem in June, really to take in George’s appointment.
Wrestling with the complexities of the last movement of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, she had only fallen into bed at five o’clock by which time the dawn chorus, who sang infinitely better than the Rutminster Choir, had started. She was woken by a maid coming in to clean the room at nine-thirty. Leaping out of bed, she frantically tugged on yesterday’s sweaty clothes. Racing down the High Street, she reached the auditorium at seven minutes to ten, only to find the place deserted. Unlike American orchestras, British players had a maddening habit of scuttling in at the last moment. As a final insult, Viking wandered in yawning at half-past ten.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ he smiled unrepentantly at Abby. ‘I was having a helicopter lesson and I couldn’t find anywhere to park. Hi, sweetheart.’ He paused on the way to kiss the Steel Elf.
Incensed because the French horns start the Fifth Symphony, Abby proceeded to dock half an hour off Viking’s pay, which triggered off the orchestra. She had vowed to be accommodating today and as a joke had even circulated a photostat of a dictionary definition of the word, pianissimo, to all the brass section to stop them drowning everyone else. But they had merely made paper darts and thrown them back at her.
Lionel the leader, who should have supported Abby, made no attempt to hush the chat that rose like a fountain whenever there was a pause. Now he asked if he might have a word. Abby jumped down from the rostrum, acutely conscious of her scruffy appearance and dirty hair beside Lionel’s coiffeured glamour. Even his breath smelt of peppermint, as he said: ‘Look, we’ve recorded this symphony with Rodney and Ambrose. If you want to get through it, just sit on top of the orchestra and coast.’
‘And leave you in charge, no, thank you,’ snapped Abby.
Lionel and Hilary exchanged told-you-so shrugs.
Two minutes later Abby called a halt.
‘Excuse me, flutes, you were dragging a little.’
‘You amaze me,’ Juno lowered her long blond eyelashes, ‘we were only following you.’
Ignoring the jibe, Abby tried to inspire them by telling them of Sibelius’s emotions when he wrote the symphony, but they all started yawning.
‘As you know the last movement ends with the six huge hammer blows of the God Thor,’ persisted Abby.
‘My back’s thore after all those semi-quavers,’ said a voice from the back of the violas.
‘Cut out the programme notes and get on with it,’ shouted Randy.
Dixie got out a porn mag.
Abby’s messianic streak emerged five minutes later when the horns launched into a glorious swinging tune.
‘This is a great euphoric affirmation of hope,’ she said earnestly, ‘which Sibelius wrote after he discovered that he wasn’t dying of cancer, after all, so I want you horns to play as though the sun was bursting through dark clouds and…’
Viking let her run on for a minute, before looking up.
‘You mean you want it louder,’ he drawled.
The orchestra cracked up.
‘No, I do not,’ screamed Abby. ‘I want you to play with more passion, and build up to a splendid sforzando.’
‘It says fortissimo in my score.’
‘Oh for God’s sake, let’s get on.’
Nellie Nicholson, the orchestra nymphomaniac, was a third desk cellist whose cello was nicknamed ‘Lucky’ by the male musicians. Five minutes later she came in loudly in one of the long pauses between the final hammer blows.
‘Sorry, sorry, Abby,’ she called out apologetically. ‘A fly landed on my score and I played it by mistake.’
Again the orchestra cracked up.
Abby totally lost her cool.
‘What in hell’s the matter with you guys?’
‘You are,’ piped up a voice from the back of the violas.
Abby couldn’t detect the offender who was hidden by Fat Isobel, who was even larger than Fat Rosie. Fat Isobel had a big jaw, and always looked as though she’d cleaned the grill pan with her hair. Despite this, on last year’s tour of the Oman, lots of Arabs had seriously tried to buy Isobel. Leaping down, barging between the second violins and violas, somehow circumnavigating Fat Isobel, Abby found Clare, the orchestra Sloane, and Candy, her best friend, from Australia, both ravishing blondes, playing battleships and discussing their sex life.
‘You will not hide behind Isobel,’ stormed Abby.
As she yanked their music-stand into view, the viola part of Sibelius’s Fifth fluttered to the floor.
‘Excuse me, Maestro,’ Steve Smithson, the RSO’s union rep, was beside her in a tric
e, breathing fire. ‘It’s Mr Charlton and the stage hands’ job to move the music-stands. If you observe Rule 223,’ he brandished the book under her nose.
For a second he and Abby glared at each other. Behind him Abby could see Nicholas, the orchestra manager, bald head bobbing like a buoy at sea, as he hopped from one foot to another in the wings, terrified at the prospect of a walk-out before the concert.
Wearily, Abby climbed back onto the rostrum.
‘Let’s play the last page again, and no-one is to come in between hammer blows.’
‘With respect, Maestro,’ said Lionel silkily, ‘it’s half-past eleven,’ and was nearly knocked sideways by junior members of the various sections and a barking Mr Nugent racing out to be first in the tea queue.
Abby slumped in the conductor’s room, burning face in her hands. Having had no time to put on a deodorant, she could smell last night’s sweat, now sour with fear. Dipping a towel in cold water, she rubbed it under her armpits, then groaned as she glanced in the mirror, the rust jersey was far too hot and clashed with her hectic red cheeks, her hair rose like Strewel Peter. She knew the orchestra were trying to goad her into resigning. She mustn’t be beaten.
Outside she could hear the cuckoo. Beyond the park, over the palest green rolling fields of barley, she could see the Blackmere Woods and knew what she must do. Splashing her face with cold water, she picked up her stick with resolve.
The second half went better. The horns and trumpets were swinging joyfully like monkeys in the jungle through the glorious heroic tune. The bows of the string players were a blur, they were going so fast.
But, as Abby paused to improve the ensemble playing of the Second Violins, little Claude ‘Cherub’ Wilson put up his hand.
Cherub, Second Percussion, had blond curls and blue eyes and hardly looked old enough to be playing in a primary-school band.
All the orchestra adored him. Miss Priddock baked him cakes. Even the Celtic Mafia allowed him to travel in their car to concerts to act as Court Jester. He was now sitting in the percussion seat behind Viking.
