by Jilly Cooper
Returning to work after her three weeks’ break was like going back to prison. Miles and Lionel, who’d chiefly employed Flora to put her nose out of joint, couldn’t wait to break the news of her appointment.
‘We would have waited for you to OK her,’ said Miles smugly, ‘but she’s so talented, we decided to snap her up.’
‘The Academy says she’s got a fantastic voice,’ even Lionel was looking quite moony, ‘which is useful if we ever need an understudy.’
‘What’s her name?’ Abby was idly flipping through her post.
‘Flora Seymour,’ Miles laughed heartily. ‘We all want to see more of Flora.’
‘Georgie Maguire’s daughter,’ said Abby, opening a typed envelope with a London postmark.
‘I said Seymour not Maguire.’
‘Still Georgie’s daughter.’
‘You sure you’ve got the right girl?’
‘Quite,’ said Abby with a malicious smile. ‘Flora and I were at the Academy together. She auditioned while I was away on vacation, right? So I couldn’t be accused of bias. She’s living in the cottage I’ve bought by the lake.’
‘Bought a cottage,’ spluttered Lionel. ‘You’re planning a long stay with the RSO?’
‘Sure am,’ crowed Abby. ‘Get a look of this.’
It was confirmation from Howie Denston that Megagram wanted to record all Fanny Mendelssohn’s music and all four of Winifred Trapp’s Harp Concertos with Abby and the RSO.
‘Who’s Winifred Trapp?’ asked Miles scornfully.
‘It’s pronounced Vinifred,’ said Abby rudely. ‘She’s a terrific nineteenth-century Swiss composer. She had to stop home and care for her elderly parents, so her oeuvre was only performed by family and friends, which meant she used a very small orchestra, which means Jackboot Hungerford can cut down on extras. I discovered her when I was living with Rodney in Lucerne. She makes marvellous use of yodelling and cowbells.’
‘Yet another hall-emptier,’ snapped Miles, but even he couldn’t argue with a fat record contract.
Wandering back to her dressing-room, Abby bumped into Viking and her heart stopped. His lean normally pale face was tanned a warm gold. Sunbathing with his hair drenched in lemon juice had turned it nearly white. He was wearing a sea-green polo shirt and dirty white shorts.
Abby couldn’t resist telling him she had heard him last night.
Viking looked alarmed.
‘Don’t tell anyone you heard me practising — it’s terrible for my image.’
On an ego trip, Abby had to break the news about Winifred Trapp and Fanny Mendelssohn.
‘It’s nearly the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Fanny’s death.’
‘Fanniversary,’ Viking grinned broadly.
‘Must you trivialize everything?’
‘I have a theory about obscure repertoire,’ said Viking, ‘If it’s onplayed, there’s very good reason. It’s either onplayable or onotterably bad. If you record it, however, you get a reputation for brilliance and innovation because there’s nothing to compare it with.’
‘You would have an utterly defeatist attitude.’ Abby flounced off in a fury.
To save money, it was decided to run a joint Mendelssohn and Trapp series in the late autumn, then Megagram could perhaps be leant on to pay for the rehearsals. There was just time to slot this change of repertoire into next season’s smart brochure, which had a picture of Abby on the front.
George had also effected a saving of thirty thousand pounds a year by sacking the marketing manager, who’d kept coming up with fatuous ideas about laser beams and back projections and the orchestra playing in their national costumes to prove how international they were.
Abby returned from her holiday to find Clarissa had left as threatened — not to London — but to join Hugo and the CCO. Abby felt betrayed and as though she had lost an ally. But she wasted no time in bringing in a new Principal Cellist, called Dimitri, who refused to be parted from his cello because it was the only possession he had managed to smuggle out of a Russian Labour Camp. Speaking precious little English he had difficulty getting a job and was as thin as a skeleton. But after spending a couple of nights in the attic bedroom at Woodbine Cottage and playing chamber music with Flora and Marcus, he soon regained his confidence. Although he cried everytime the orchestra played The Great Gate of Kiev, he added wonderful gravitas and a great deep Russian sound to the cello section. As a result, Dimitri adored Abby and was horrified by the orchestra’s deep disrespect for her.
Despite Miles’s and Lionel’s belief that it would put Abby’s nose out of joint to employ Flora, Abby liked pretty women in the orchestra, as long as they played well. She had therefore spiced up the back of the violins with an enchanting Japanese girl called Noriko. Noriko couldn’t pronounce her ‘L’s and kept everyone in stitches ordering River and Bacon at the Shaven Crown and suggesting the Steel Elf, who was having trouble paying her mortgage since Viking moved out, ‘should take in a roger’.
Viking and Juno were both too proud to make it up, but romance-watchers had noticed Juno definitely making big bluey-green eyes at George Hungerford.
‘That would be a dangerous liaison,’ said Dixie gloomily, ‘she would have us all out in a trice.’
Flora’s first rehearsal with the RSO at the beginning of July was greeted with a chorus of wolf-whistles. She had tied back her newly washed hair with a grey ribbon, she wore no make-up on her gold freckled skin. Her legs in grey linen shorts were almost chunky. But there was an undeniable sexuality about her, perhaps because she was totally lacking in new-girl nerves. Used to playing solo at college, she attacked every piece with vigour, and if she came in too early, or played a wrong note, she burst out laughing, thus giving confidence to other newcomers like Jenny and Noriko who were too shy of scorn even to practise in public.
Flora took Foxie, her puppet-fox mascot, everywhere with her, reducing the nearby players to fits of giggles by making him conduct with her pencil, or putting his paws over his ears and shaking his head at moments of discord or stress. Flora also chattered to everyone and was absurdly generous.
In her second week when they were waiting for Abby who’d been delayed by some management wrangle, Flora plied her own section and the surrounding players with lemon sherbets. They were about to rehearse the Valse des Fleurs, which required a harpist, and even contained an important harp cadenza.
Harpists are often regarded as something of a joke in orchestras. But, if the RSO laughed at Miss Parrott, they also loved and admired her. A middle-aged spinster with piled-up strawberry-pink hair, she always wore high heels and very bright colours: ‘If you’re in the shop window for a long tayme you tend to fade so Ay like to look colourful,’ and rose above the orchestra as dignified as her gold harp, which she plucked at with long red fingers.
Miss Parrott looked on and missed nothing, passing the time when she wasn’t playing knitting brightly coloured scarves for her favourites in the orchestra. Blue and Viking had two each. She always had a beta blocker and a glass of sherry before concerts, and liked to play her harp beside the flutes, complaining bitterly if ever she were relegated to the back of the Second Violins.
Although Miss Parrott claimed: ‘My feet are danglin’ from the shelf,’ she had no shortage of male admirers to mend plugs and tyres for her and carry her harp in and out of concert halls. Finally she was an inveterate moonlighter and, that very evening, after she’d dispatched Valse des Fleurs in the first half at Rutminster, would be belting over to Cotchester to play Debussy’s Dances Sacres et Profanes with the CCO.
Having finished her lemon sherbet, she asked Flora if she could have another one.
‘Goodness, Miss Parrott,’ piped up Cherub, ‘you’ve got a big suck.’
‘If you were ten years older, and Ay were ten years younger, Ay’d show you, young man,’ said Miss Parrott calmly.
Shouts of laughter greeted this as poor Cherub went as red as his bass drum.
As a new girl, Flora had been
placed behind Fat Isobel, beside Militant Moll and in front of Juno and Hilary, none of whom were at all enthusiastic about her arrival.
Viking, who usually claimed droit de seigneur over any pretty girl who joined the orchestra, had noticed Flora’s bitten nails at the audition and the occasional flicker of desolation on her face, and didn’t believe she was as bonny and blithe as she appeared.
Writing: ‘Will you have a drink with me after this?’ on a paper dart, he chucked it in her direction.
Alas, the dart flew over Flora’s head and fluttered down onto the massive bosom of Fat Isobel who, still disappointed at being passed up during Viking’s erotic bonanza on the bus to Starhampton, swung round nodding frantically in acceptance.
‘Jesus, I’ll have to empty Oddbins,’ muttered an appalled Viking.
‘Isobel’s got lovely skin,’ protested Miss Parrott kindly.
‘Pity there’s so much of it,’ sighed Viking.
The rest of the Celtic Mafia were still crying with laughter when Abby arrived.
‘Quiet please, let’s get started,’ she said briskly. ‘Where are Clare and Dixie?’
‘Still in the pub,’ said Juno primly.
‘Shall I go and get them?’ piped up Flora eager to escape for a quick one.
‘Noriko can go,’ said Abby, adding pointedly, ‘she doesn’t drink.’
She couldn’t help feeling wildly jealous that Flora had been accepted so easily and had this gift of making people love her. Everyone wanted to play chamber music with her, the telephone rang the whole time at the cottage, her pigeon hole at H.P. Hall was filled with notes.
I must start playing the violin again, thought Abby fretfully, so people want to play chamber music with me.
‘It’s only because Flora’s new,’ Abby overheard Juno saying bitchily to Hilary. ‘They’ll soon get bored of her.’
THIRTY-ONE
Rutminster was gripped by a heatwave. Plans for holding Piggy Parker’s sixtieth-birthday concert inside or providing the orchestra with a canopy were shelved as the ground cracked, the huge domed trees in the grounds of Rutminster Towers shed their first yellow leaves and Mrs Parker repeatedly cursed her mother for conceiving her in a Ramsgate boarding-house in October rather than in September — which meant her birthday fell at the end of July, by which time the roses had gone over.
Short of glueing back every petal, the only answer was to bus in furiously clashing bedding plants from Parker’s Horticultural Emporium. Lorry-loads of electric-blue hydrangeas and scarlet petunias were racing armies of caterers up the drive, as the orchestra struggled in for an early rehearsal and to check the timing of the fireworks in William Tell, before the heat became too punishing.
Rutminster Towers itself stood in all its neo-Gothic glory, surrounded by a formal garden and parkland, overlooking the River Fleet. A platform for orchestra and choir had been set up on the river’s edge. Bronzed workmen putting up a large red-and-white striped VIP tent eyed Flora as she paddled and splashed water over a panting Mr Nugent.
Mrs Parker was frantic everything should go well. As a year ago, a pleasure launch of Hoorays playing pop music and drunkenly yelling ‘Hellair’ had disrupted Panis Angelicus, she was personally prepared to dam the river with her vast bulk to stop anyone sailing upstream during the concert.
She had, however, graciously invited the ladies of the orchestra to hang their dresses in the Long Gallery.
‘Is that a genuine Picasso?’ asked Nellie, as she peered in awe into the le-ounge.
‘No, no,’ giggled Candy, ‘look on the back. It says “Do Not Freeze, This Side Up”.’
‘Admiring my Picarso,’ said a loud voice behind them. ‘It was a silver wedding-gift from my late hubby.’
‘She’s even matched her grand piano exactly to the panelling,’ Clare told Dixie as she returned from the house, ‘and every piece of ghastly furniture is for sale.’
‘You don’t think an old bag like Piggy Porker would pass up an opportunity for commercial gain,’ said Dixie. ‘You could probably buy that oak tree for twenty grand.’
‘I’ll pay Sonny twenty grand to stay away,’ said Clare. ‘He’s been so preoccupied with his première he even forgot to buy Mumsy a birthday card.’
Today was also the birthday of Ninion, Second Oboe and oppressed partner of Militant Moll.
‘Just proves what utter crap astrology is,’ sneered Carmine Jones getting his trumpet out of its case, ‘when a thug like Piggy Porker and a wimp like Ninion have birthdays on the same day.’
Ninion ignored the crack, but his hands shook as he read his and Mrs Parker’s horoscope in the Rutminster Echo, which was part owned by Mrs Parker anyway, and which said it would be a good day for fireworks.
Underneath his mild blinking, field-mouse exterior, Ninion was hopping mad. Second Oboe often doubles up as cor anglais, but Knickers and Abby had humiliatingly not thought he was good enough to play the long ravishing cor anglais solo in William Tell, and brought in Carmine Jones’s wife, Catherine, as an extra.
Militant Moll should have been pleased a woman had been given the job. Instead she berated Ninion for not standing up for his rights.
‘You are quite capable of playing that solo, Nin. Why d’you let people push you around? Catherine Jones is a drip not to have left Carmine years ago.’
Moll was taking Ninion to a woman composers’ workshop in Bath as a birthday treat. Ninion brooded; he was fed up with women.
The surrounding fields were silvered with dew as the orchestra tuned up, but no breeze ruffled the forget-me-nots languishing on the river-bank. As Flora returned a dripping Nugent to Viking, she breathed in a heady scent. At first she thought it came from a nearby lime tree. Then she realized it was Blue’s aftershave, which he never wore normally, and that he had put on a ravishing new duck-egg-blue shirt. Blue was so handsome, quiet and dependable, but there was a sadness about him. Flora wondered if he were gay and secretly in love with Viking. He never had any women around.
‘God, it’s baking,’ said Viking, who was sharing his breakfast of a pork pie and a Kit-Kat with Mr Nugent. ‘Oh, go away,’ he snapped at Fat Isobel, who’d been panting after him like a St Bernard since he’d taken her out for a drink.
Flora looked up at the house. ‘How the hell did Piggy Porker get permission to build such an excrescence in such a beautiful park?’ she asked ‘Every councillor has his price,’ explained Viking contemptuously. ‘All the fat cats on Rutminster Council, who you’ll see guzzling champagne this evening probably received a nice nest-egg in a Swiss bank or holiday home in Barbados. I wonder if Alan Cardew, the planning officer, would enjoy knowing that his wife Lindy is currently being knocked off by Carmine Jones.’
‘How could she? He’s loathsome. Imagine that brickred sneering face kissing you.’
‘That’s why Lindy was so livid when Abby sacked her from the choir. She can’t pretend to be sloping off to choir practice any more.’
‘All right, let’s get started,’ Abby had arrived, looking deathly pale after a sleepless night wondering whether to do a runner rather than be made over by Peggy’s beauticians. She was wearing a dark red vest and black bicycle shorts, and her lips tightened as she saw Flora gossiping with Viking.
The orchestra quickly whizzed through William Tell. Catherine Jones wasn’t turning up until the concert, so Ninion had to deputize for her, which made him crosser than ever. The fireworks would be let off after the trumpet fanfare during the rousing finale, which everyone knew because it had once been The Lone Ranger’s signature tune.
Fortunately the electrician who’d spent the morning hammering Roman candles, rockets and Catherine wheels onto posts liked music and knew exactly when to start the display.
‘Miss Rosen, we’re ready for you. I’m Crystelle by the way,’ called out a Parker beautician, who hovered, smiling like a crocodile. Her make-up was so thick you could have chucked rocks at it.
For a second Abby stared down at her, terrified and proud, Sidne
y Carton at the scaffold. Then she gathered up her sticks and her scores.
‘Please don’t ruin her, she’s so beautiful,’ called out Flora as Crystelle frogmarched Abby back to the house.
‘You need your eyes tested, Flora,’ said Carmine Jones nastily.
‘And you need a face transplant,’ shouted Flora.
The orchestra roared with laughter; singly most of them were too frightened to take on Carmine, whose face was now engorged with rage like a slice of black pudding.
It was now time for Sonny to take a last rehearsal of his Eternal Triangle for orchestra, cow bells and yodeller. A little man with a very large ego, Sonny (or rather Mumsy) had paid for several extra rehearsals. Many contemporary composers prefer to be programmed with other twentieth-century music. Not Sonny.
‘I’m not frightened of comparison with the great masters.’
Crash, bang, plink, plonk, went the orchestra. Sonny, a hopeless conductor, looked as though he were swimming through deep water and occasionally spearing a jelly fish.
Nor did he know anything about music, but fancying Viking, whose body was turning dark gold above his dirty white shorts, called out: ‘Four bars after twenty, Horns, marked gestopft. Could you play it on your own?’
‘Gestopft’ means putting the right hand up the bell of the horn to produce a muted buzzing sound. Viking, however, muttered to his section, ‘OKlads, play flat out.’
The next moment five horns blared out making two nearby pigeons and the rest of the orchestra jump out of their skins.
‘For goodness’ sake,’ spluttered Hilary, who hadn’t imagined she’d need her industrial ear plugs in the open air.
Sonny, however, was in raptures.
‘Splendid, Viking, splendid.’ He thrust forward a circle formed by his first finger and thumb.
‘Nor does the silly bugger realize that the trumpet’s been transposed into the wrong key by the copyist for the last three rehearsals,’ said Viking scornfully.
‘He’s been too busy jogging so he can rush up onto the platform in time to catch the applause,’ said Blue, shaking water out of his tuning slide.
