by Jilly Cooper
‘Scuse me, Miss Rosen.’
‘Yes Cherub,’ Abby’s face softened.
‘You know that bit in the first movement?’
Abby picked up the score and patiently started to leaf back through the pages.
‘Which bit, Cherub?’
‘The bit when the horns come in an’ the trumpets an’ the strings.’
‘There are a lot of bits like that.’
Cherub leant forward, consulting Viking’s score.
‘I found it a minute ago, it goes, la, la, la, la, la, la, la,’ he sung in a shrill falsetto, ‘or maybe it’s la, la, la, la, la, la.’
The orchestra were clutching their sides.
‘Don’t laugh at Cherub,’ snapped Abby. ‘I know that bit,’ she flipped more pages. ‘Here it is. But you’re not even playing,’ she cried in outrage, then realizing she’d been hoodwinked, ‘in fact there’s no percussion in this symphony.’
‘I know,’ Cherub beamed at her. ‘But it’s a nice bit, isn’t it? We do like nice bits you know; can you play it again?’
‘No, we flaming can’t,’ Abby contemplated hurling her score at him, but she couldn’t throw that far.
Quivering with rage, she clutched the brass rail, counting to ten, deciding to give them one more chance.
‘During the break,’ she leafed forward to the last movement, ‘I looked out at the Blackmere Woods, and realized how all the different greens contribute to the beauty of the spring, merging together like a great orchestra.’
Cynical, bored, impatient, menacing, the RSO spread out below her.
‘I like to think of you, Eldred and Hilary, and your clarinets providing the acid yellow of the poplars, right, and the trombones,’ Abby smiled at Dixie, ‘like the stinging saffron of the great oaks, and the flutes, the lovely eerie silver of the whitebeams. Barry’s basses splendid dark evergreens, and of course the horns, Viking and Blue and co., soaring like beech trees topped with radiant dancing pale green.’
‘I don’t want Nugent lifting his leg on me,’ grumbled Viking.
But Abby was in her stride. Looking round at the rapt faces, she thought: I’ve got them at last.
‘I could find trees to illustrate the wonder of the trumpets and the bassoons,’ she smiled forgivingly at Steve Smithson, the union rep, ‘but all I want to say is that like the spring the sound of your individual instruments can blend together to create the beauty of Sibelius-’
But, as she paused to wipe away a tear, Dixie Douglas let out a long and hellish fart.
Immediately Hilary leapt to her feet, flapping her score in horror.
‘Lionel, do something.’
And Abby flipped. She was screaming so hysterically at Dixie, that she didn’t hear the door opening at the back of the hall, or notice the laughter freezing on the faces of the players.
Hearing voices, however, she swung round.
‘Get out, get OUT, how many times have I told you, visitors are not allowed in the hall during rehearsals.’
‘Unless they wear gas masks,’ said Viking.
But the visitors came on. Abby swung round again, with the words: ‘Didn’t you fucking hear me?’ dying on her lips. For it was the chairman, a smirking Miles and a handsome, belligerent stranger.
‘Sorry to interrupt you, Abby,’ said Lord Leatherhead heartily, ‘but I just wanted to introduce you all to your new — er — chief executive, George Hungerford.’
All the orchestra clapped in delight.
Surreptitiously, from behind the bulk of Fat Isobel, Candy got out a huge red brush, powdered her nose, then handed the brush to Clare.
George Hungerford had a square jaw, a broken nose, a mouth set like a trap and tired, hard, turned down eyes behind horn-rimmed spectacles. He looked as tough as a limestone cliff and about as unscalable. He had thick hair, which was cropped very close to his head and the colour and strokeable texture of a bullrush. His dark grey suit was well cut to set off flat, broad shoulders, but also to disguise a spreading midriff.
‘He looks like a bouncer,’ murmured Randy Hamilton.
‘And we all know who we want him to chuck out,’ murmured back Dixie.
George then mounted the stage and told the orchestra in a broad Yorkshire accent, how much he was looking forward to working with them. As he talked, his eyes moved solemnly over each player as though he was memorizing their faces for some future conjuring trick.
He didn’t envisage any great problems, he said.
‘Running an orchestra’s like running any other business. If it doesn’t make a profit, you make changes. I’d like to look at what you’re all up to before I make any decisions.’ Then he added without a flicker of a smile, ‘And I hope you all play a bloody sight better this evening.’
‘Why the hell’s George Hungerford interested in us?’ Viking asked Blue. ‘His usual form is bribing planning officers and knee-capping little old sitting-tenants.’
‘I’d lie down in front of his bulldozer any day,’ sighed Candy.
‘Looks ruthless,’ said Hilary, with a sniff.
‘He is, too,’ giggled Clare, the orchestra Sloane. ‘His wife was called Ruth. They split up last year. I read all about it in the News of the World. Ruth ran off with one of his even richer rivals. She’s very beautiful in a Weybridge, skirt-on-the-knee, matching accessory way. Those classical types always screw like stoats beneath the Elizabeth Arden exterior.’
‘You should know,’ said Hilary bitchily.
Abby slunk back to the Old Bell, mortified that George’s first impression should have been of a sweaty, shaggy, screaming virago. Tonight she would wow him.
As if in anticipation, two cardboard boxes of ge-owns were awaiting her from Parker’s; horrors in mauve, lime-green, jaundice-yellow and the most shocking pink, encrusted with rhinestones, sequins and diamanté, over-busy with cowled necklines, floating panels and kick pleats.
Accompanying them was a handwritten, bullying note, urging Abby to make George’s first night special with an evening gown fitting the occasion in every sense. Mrs Parker had somehow got hold of Abby’s measurements.
Incensed at being dictated to, Abby didn’t even try them on, merely washing her hair and dressing in the flowing indigo trouser suit she’d worn at her début concert.
She wished she had a friend in the orchestra with whom to discuss George. He had seemed so forceful because he’d made no attempt to ingratiate himself. He had certainly electrified the women in the orchestra. Parker’s sold out of scented body lotion by closing time, and scuffles broke out in the changing room, as the prettiest girls fought for a glimpse in the communal mirror as they applied blusher and knotted coloured ribbons in their hair.
Hilary was livid, on George’s first night, that Eldred and not she was playing the clarinet solo in the Mother Goose Suite.
‘That dress is much too low, Nellie,’ she snapped. ‘You know we can’t show bare arms or cleavages.’
‘Some of us haven’t got cleavages to show,’ said Nellie, rudely as she sprayed Anais Anais behind her knees. ‘George Hungerford won’t know I haven’t got plunging permission.’
‘With all the different floral scents wafting from the orchestra,’ giggled Candy to Clare, ‘Abby’s going to get her image of a spring meadow, if not a wood.’
Abby was desperate for everything to go well, but, alas, the concert was a disaster. Some joker had slotted a page from Dixie’s porn mag into the middle of her Mother Goose score. Scrumpling it up in a rage, she chucked it over her shoulder, where it landed in the massive, corsetted lap of Mrs Parker, who was already spitting because no ge-own had been worn.
The hall was half-empty and the pouring rain, which had discouraged random ticket buyers, dripped through the roof on Abby’s head, but failed to extinguish the fire in a local bakery, so the first movement of Sibelius was ruined by clanging fire-engines. Worst of all, one of Miss Priddock’s programme sellers, over-excited by the arrival of George Hungerford, charged back and forth to the Ladies
throughout, and when a chain wouldn’t pull, started furiously clanking in syncopation to the heroic swinging tune in the horns, reducing the RSO to more fits of laughter.
‘Delhi Belly Variations,’ murmured Viking to Blue as he emptied water out of his horn.
But at last they reached the six wonderfully dramatic hammer blows, which test any conductor, because an audience can often assume the whole thing’s finished and start clapping too early.
Abby’s pauses were the longest and most dramatic ever heard in the H.P. Hall, but during the penultimate silence, the chain in the Ladies clanked again. Dixie Douglas promptly corpsed and came in a beat too soon. Forgetting herself, an incensed Abby raised two very public fingers at him and, running off the platform, locked herself in the conductor’s room, refusing to acknowledge any of the applause. She needed a showdown with George so she could pour out her grievances, but when she finally unlocked the door the place was deserted, and the caretaker was locking up.
Escaping through a side-door, Abby found the rain had stopped, and breathed in a lovely smell of wet earth and the lilies of the valley which Old Cyril had planted under Miss Priddock’s window.
During concerts, the orchestral car-park was jam-packed with small used cars, vans, old Volvos with different coloured doors, Morris Minors and Viking’s ancient BMW with the ‘Hit Me, I Need the Money’ sticker in the back. It was now deserted except for a blue Rolls Royce and one of George Hungerford’s heavies in a chauffeur’s uniform and a state of shock.
‘Fort we’d never escape wivout injury,’ he patted the Rolls’ bonnet, ‘but it was empty in five minutes. Vroom, vroom, vroom. No-one ‘it us. Never seen driving like it.’
‘Glad they do something well.’
‘It was a grite concert. Don’t know how you remember all them notes.’
‘Thanks,’ said Abby. ‘Where’s your boss?’
The chauffeur nodded up to the chairman’s office, where George Hungerford, puffing at a cigar, blotted out light from the window, as he paced back and forth, talking and talking.
Probably about me, thought Abby wearily.
As she entered her hotel, a yawning receptionist handed her a big bunch of wild garlic.
‘A child has just delivered this.’
Imagining some kind of voodoo, Abby was about to chuck the starry white flowers into the street, when she found a note, which she ripped open with trembling hands. She read:
Dear Miss Rosen,
Sorry I upset you,
love
Cherub Wilson.
It was the first kindness anyone had shown her in weeks. Abby started to cry helplessly. She must get a grip on herself.
Her honeymoon with the Rutshire Butcher it seemed was also over. His review of the concert was headlined: FLUSHED WITH SUCCESS — ‘The lavatory chain,’ he wrote, ‘was the only thing that played at the correct tempo in Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony.’
TWENTY-EIGHT
Fortunately George Hungerford disappeared in his helicopter the following morning, no doubt looking for properties to develop. He also had several acres in central Manchester to think about. After a slight blip in the recession, the developer’s cranes were flying again.
In the afternoon, the RSO, who were supposed to provide music for nine counties and who had at least two away fixtures a week, were due to set off to Starhampton in the West Country. Two coaches had been laid on for the hundred-mile journey. The first coach, which included non-smokers and non-drinkers, a bridge four who played regularly together and a high-minded group, headed by Hilary, who sang madrigals, was known as ‘Pond Life’. The second, which included drinkers, smokers and brass players was known as ‘Moulin Rouge’.
The Musicians’ Union is one of the few unions virtually untouched by Thatcher’s reforms. Steve Smithson set out on every trip armed with a tape measure (because any gig over seven miles away entitled the musicians to a meal allowance), a stop watch so they got sufficient breaks the other end and a thermometer to make sure the hall, cathedral or school in which they were playing reached the required seventy degrees.
Before an away fixture there was always an argy-bargy between Steve and Nicholas, the orchestra manager, who was known to the musicians as ‘Knickers’.
Orchestras are sustained by silly jokes. When poor Nicholas was unhappy and stressed out, which was most of the time, they all chorused ‘Knickers Down’, or ‘Knickers in a Twist’. Today Knickers had caught Steve trying to persuade the bus drivers to leave at one and dawdle, instead of one-thirty, so that the musicians could claim for a lunch allowance.
It was now twenty-nine minutes past one and Knickers stood beside the artists’ entrance of H.P. Hall, ticking off names in a tartan notebook as musicians clambered aboard the two coaches.
By one-thirty only Little Jenny was missing. As she played at the back of the second violins, it wouldn’t be a major crisis if she didn’t show up. So the buses set off, splashing down the High Street out into the angelic springtime, stopping to pick up Simon Painshaw from his bachelor pad in the Close and Hilary from her thatched cottage, and Barry, the Principal Bass, from his converted barn, with his beautiful new second wife running barefoot across the lawn to kiss him goodbye.
After yesterday’s downpour, cricket pitches under water glittered in the sunshine and puddles reflected thundery grey sky, pale green trees and clashing pink hawthorns.
It was an incontrovertible fact that however capable the RSO were of pulling rabbits out of hats and playing superbly when they reached their destination, many of them behaved like hyperactive children before and afterwards.
Usually Viking drove to concerts in his battered BMW, which had been fitted with a hooter that played Don Juan’s horn call. Into the car he would cram Juno, Blue, Randy, Dixie and Cherub, so they could all apply for a petrol allowance, or on occasion, a train fare.
But, at the last moment, Juno had cried off with flu. Finding a replacement at such short notice had added to Knickers’ problems.
As it was also Viking’s birthday, he and the Celtic Mafia decided to travel on Moulin Rouge. Viking, who’d been blasting his lip away moonlighting with a local jazz band, hadn’t been to bed and was drunk when he got onto the coach. Freed from Juno’s beady chaperonage, he was soon pouncing on every girl in sight.
‘That guy’s got no stop button,’ observed Candy, who was sitting beside her friend Clare, who was flipping through Hello! and Tatler recognizing all her friends.
‘When he’s plastered he’ll bonk anything,’ Clare lowered her voice, ‘Juno gave him a Black amp; Decker for his birthday, such an affront to his manhood. I think he’s miserable.’
‘Then why does he leap to her defence whenever Appassionata has a go at her?’
‘Must be elf-obsessed,’ giggled Candy. ‘Oh, there’s you,’ she peered at Tatler. ‘That ball gown’s great.’
From the back of the coach came shouts of laughter and the snatch of a rugger song, followed by Cherub’s high-pitched giggle which set everyone off. Blue sat slightly apart sipping malt whisky, immersed in Alan Clark’s diaries. Randy and Dixie were obviously determined to catch up with Viking, who was now snogging an overjoyed Nellie the Nympho.
In the Pond Life coach in front, as they drove through the outskirts of Bath, the madrigal group could be seen making silly faces.
‘April is in my mistress’ face and July in her eyes,’ sang Lionel in a light tenor as he gazed at a simpering Hilary.
Also in the group was Simon Painshaw, his red dreadlocks flying as he tossed his head in time to the music, and Molly Armitage, a rank-and-file viola player. Known as ‘Militant Moll’, Molly had short spiky hair, an aggrieved face, a triangular figure, with narrow, twitching shoulders falling to massive hips, and thought everything degraded women. She was having an affaire with Ninion, Second Oboe, who was half her size and normally very meek. Molly, however, had so fired him up that he had become very assertive and wanted to oust Simon as First Oboe. Militant Moll also wanted Nini
on to leave his wife and take her name.
‘Fa, la, la, la, la, la,’ sang Militant Moll, gazing into Ninion’s blinking fieldmouse eyes.
‘Lardi, da, da, da, da, da,’ giggled Nellie, buttoning up her dress as she collapsed behind Candy and Clare. ‘That Hilary is such a bitch. Look at her vamping Lionel in her pie-frill collar. She gave me another bollocking about my cleavage last night. “You are not allowed to show flesh, Nell, we are all supposed to look black at distance.”’
Nellie caught Hilary’s mincing whine to perfection.
‘I’ll black her eye. You wait till she sees what I’m wearing tonight, the slit up my skirt meets my plunge head-on. I wonder how long it’ll be before L’Appassionata is shoehorned into one of Nosy Parker’s ghastly ge-owns.’
‘Wonder how long it will be before Gorgeous George shoehorns her out of the job,’ said Clare. ‘You can’t get away with V-signs on the platform, even if it’s only at Dixie.’
‘Taking my name in vain as usual. Any of you girls want a drink?’
Dixie armed with paper cups and a bottle of Southern Comfort, was swaying above them. His normally red face and neck were now as brown as a builder’s from so much free time playing golf and reading the Sun on the flat roof of H.P.Hall.
‘There you are again,’ Candy had found another picture of Clare, this time at a wedding in Hello!.
‘And there’s my wicked brother and there’s Mummy,’ cried Clare.
Dixie glanced at Hello!.
‘I wouldn’t mind getting orf with Mummah myself,’ he mocked, as he handed paper cups to both girls.
Clare giggled. Despite that gha-a-a-astly accent, she thought Dixie frightfully attractive.
Dixie also had the ‘hots’ for Clare. Despite those awful corduroy culottes and the matelot jersey tugged down to cover a big bum, and an Alice band holding her brains in, Clare was a natural blonde with lovely skin and slender ankles.
‘I’ll fix Lady Clare,’ Dixie muttered to Randy on his return. ‘I’ll wipe Daddy’s smile off his face in Hello!.’
