by Jilly Cooper
The orchestra raised their eyes to heaven and started to yawn ostentatiously.
‘Scythian Suite,’ persisted Abby, ‘one of the cellists said to the conductor: “Just because I have a wife who is sick and three kids to support, why must I be forced to endure such hell?” Musicians have always resisted innovation, if you know what I mean.’
‘That’s the trouble,’ said Carmine rudely, ‘none of us know what you do mean.’
‘Musicians don’t want to be lectured,’ said Davie Buckle, starting another game of patience on top of his drums. ‘They want to play the concert, then go out, get pissed and have a curry.’
The orchestra fell about.
It was time for Cathie to play ‘Rachel’s Lament’ for the first time, initially just as an extended echo in the ‘Lachrymosa’, then leading up to the long final solo in the ‘Libera Me’.
Surely they must realize how beautiful it is, prayed Abby. But Cathie was so nervous, so exhausted at the end of the school holidays, and so conscious of Carmine’s angry little red brake-light eyes boring into her, that she made a complete hash of it.
‘Gee, you screwed up on that one,’ said Abby in disappointment after the third botched attempt and leapt down to talk to Cathie. If she fluffed the “Lachrymosa” how the hell was she going to cope with the “Libera Me”.
‘I thought Boris was giving the big solo to Viking,’ whispered Dixie.
‘Boris has changed his total lack of tune,’ whispered back Randy. ‘Evidently Boris is knocking off his au pair and Viking’s nicked her, but only after Viking caught Boris in flagrante with-’ a wicked smile spread over Randy’s face, as he lowered his voice even more.
‘You gotta be joking,’ Dixie looked at Abby, his eyes on stalks. Then, immediately turning to his Second Trombone, ‘Did you know that Boris is bonking-’
Soon the story was whizzing around the orchestra, like starlings alighting on different trees at dusk.
‘What are you reading, Flawless?’ asked Viking.
‘“Sohrab and Rustram”,’ snapped Flora, who hadn’t forgiven Viking. ‘It’s about much more heroic men than you lot.’
‘Someone should write a poem called “So Bad on Rostrum”.’
‘That’s not funny, if you hadn’t jumped on Astrid, you’d be playing that solo.’
As they struggled for another ten minutes, Abby felt utterly superfluous, the orchestra were far too busy sight-reading to look at her.
‘Where the fuck are we?’ Viking asked Blue, as resounding crashes, twangs and shrieks rent the air.
‘Two bars to go. I’ll bring you in-’
Abby called a halt. ‘That was terrible.’
‘It would help if you beat a little more clearly,’ called out Juno.
Abby ignored her.
‘The next bit is really sad,’ Abby attempted a weak joke. ‘Could you play it, I guess, as Lionel looks?’
Lionel was furious. Confronted by a series of glissandos and teeth-gritting shrieks achieved by drawing the side of the bow down the strings, he pretended to cry.
‘I cannot bear it,’ he said, putting his head carefully in his hands so as not to disturb the lustrous blow-dried waves. ‘My string players have dedicated their lives to producing a beautiful sound-’
Abby raised an eyebrow.
‘And they are forced to make fools of themselves playing this junk.’
Lionel was acting up because over the page he had discovered the long solo Boris had deliberately made difficult for him, which was only accompanied by the basses. Compelled to tackle it, he pretended to be fooling around and deliberately making the most ghastly cock up.
‘You’re not trying,’ raged Abby, beyond any awareness that it was below the belt to bawl out a leader in front of his orchestra.
The RSO brightened at the prospect of a screaming match.
‘It’s unplayable,’ said Lionel flatly.
‘Don’t be such a goddamn wimp.’
‘You only say that, Maestro,’ furiously Hilary leapt to the defence of her beloved, ‘because there’s no way you could ever play it.’
Putting down the Selected Poems of Matthew Arnold, Flora said calmly, ‘Boris used to play the violin in an orchestra. He’s perfectly aware of its limitations and capabilities.’
‘You hold your tongue, young lady,’ said Hilary furiously.
‘It’s impossible, unplayable junk,’ intoned Lionel.
‘It is not,’ screamed Abby.
‘It fucking well is.’
‘Fucking isn’t.’ Jibbering with rage, Abby leapt from the rostrum, snatched Lionel’s fiddle and played the solo absolutely perfectly.
There was a stunned, stunned silence — long enough to play a Bruckner symphony. The musicians looked at Abby in amazement, but not in nearly as much amazement as Abby looked at Lionel’s violin. As she handed it back, Flora, roused out of her habitual cool, rushed forward, sending a music-stand and its music flying.
‘Oh Abby,’ she said in a choked voice. ‘Don’t you realize what this means? It’s come back, you can play again. Oh Abby.’
And the whole orchestra, except Lionel, Hilary, Juno and Carmine, stood up and cheered.
Abby looked utterly shell-shocked.
‘Thank you, everyone. That’s it for today; we’ll start with the Brahms Violin Concerto first thing after lunch tomorrow,’ she said, ending the rehearsal twenty minutes early and emerging from the dark inferno of Boris Levitsky into the sunshine.
Flora brought a couple of bottles of Muscadet back to Woodbine Cottage, and she and Abby celebrated with Marcus. Abby was still shell-shocked.
‘I cannot believe it, I’m sure it was a fluke. Did it really sound OK?’ she begged Flora over and over again.
‘Course it did,’ said Flora. ‘And that miraculous blood-curdling wonderful sound couldn’t have come from anyone else.’
‘Play something now,’ pleaded Marcus, picking up Abby’s coat and hanging it up in the hall, ‘just to convince yourself. I want to hear it, too.’
‘I daren’t, not yet. I don’t want to tempt providence and I don’t want any more to drink,’ Abby put her hand over her glass. ‘I gotta work.’
‘I don’t know why you bother,’ grumbled Flora, topping up her own glass, ‘after the way those pigs treat you. Just walk out and go back to reducing the whole world to orgasm on the violin. Come on, let’s get pissed.’
But Abby refused. Desperate to be alone, she disappeared to her room to mug up the Brahms concerto. It was the last piece she had done before she had cut her wrist. It would be unendurable not to be playing it tomorrow. Perhaps a miracle had happened and she could return to the violin, but she still hated giving up the RSO without a fight.
She couldn’t concentrate. Every note remembered was anguish. Throwing open her bedroom window, which looked on to the front garden, she disturbed a swarm of peacock butterflies gorging themselves on the buddleia. Was it proverbial vanity which made them match their rust-and-purple wings so perfectly to the pale purple flowers?
Thistledown floated through the air; the fields of stubble, platinum-blond in the morning sunshine, were now red-gold after the rain. The white trumpets of the convolvulus rioting along the hedgerow reminded her of her brass section. She could smell frying garlic and onions. Marcus must be cooking supper, banging pans after all that Muscadet. He had been so kind when Boris had humiliated her. She must find him work.
Then everything was forgotten as through the dusk she heard Viking, the ultimate peacock, practising, idling around with ‘Rachel’s Lament’, the sound carrying across the still lake. Oh God, he should be playing the solo. It would be tragic if Lionel persuaded George to drop the Requiem. Lionel was also poisoning the orchestra against her. How she longed to follow the path of meadowsweet down the stream and ask Viking’s advice.
Maria Kusak, who was playing the Brahms Violin Concerto, was yet another Shepherd Denston artist booked at 10 per cent less, because the RSO had employed Abby. A contemporar
y of Abby’s at the Moscow Conservatoire, she was, like Benny, very jealous of Abby’s former success. A charming, curvacious, bottled blonde with high cheek-bones and naughty slanting brown eyes, she had been one of Rodney’s pets and was upset to find such a dear doting old man had been replaced by her greatest rival.
Lionel, after yesterday’s humiliation, was revving up for a showdown. He had already had a word with George.
‘I wept for my musicians,’ he repeated sententiously, ‘and she mocked me. It is an honour to sit in the first chair of a great orchestra, but how can I have any authority as a leader if she constantly undermines me in front of the players.’
‘She’d better go back to playing the fiddle,’ said George, and had a sharp word with Abby to soft-pedal the histrionics.
‘Maria’s very popular with the Rutminster audience,’ he added brusquely. ‘We’ve nearly sold out this evening — give her her head.’
Maria was also very popular with the orchestra who gave her a round of applause when she arrived the following afternoon, but, although she dimpled and smiled, she was in fact in a furious temper. Having decided that George was as attractively macho as he was rich, she had slipped into Tower Records in Rutminster High Street to buy her own recording of the Saint-Saëns Third Concerto in order to sign it for him. She was not pleased to be told by the assistant, who did not recognize her, that she ought to have bought Abigail Rosen’s version — it was still easily the best.
On the other hand, Maria had a trump card, which she knew would crucify Abby. She was playing on Abby’s old Strad.
Simon Painshaw was also uptight and tearing his red dreadlocks because he had to open the second movement of the concerto with one of the most beautiful solos Brahms or anyone had ever written. All the woodwind were busy in that movement, but they were still only the Supremes to First Oboe’s Diana Ross.
Arriving at the hall, Simon had been accosted by Hilary, bossily ticking him off for not tuning up half an hour earlier so he could play in his quarter-final match in the RSO conker competition. As a result she had rescheduled his match for this evening in the meal-break before the concert.
Simon had become wildly agitated. He had been making reeds, the thin pipes through which oboists blow, which was a hellishly finickety job, since ten o’clock that morning, he said.
‘And I’m not playing any conker match this evening. I’ve got to psych myself up for my solo.’
‘Half the orchestra are in the conker competition,’ said Hilary furiously, ‘and they’re not going to wait around at your convenience. All you think about are your silly reeds.’
Simon had flipped and started screaming about fucking kids’ games. Abby, coming out of the conductor’s room, had backed him up and told Hilary to eff off.
‘Love conkers all,’ said a passing Viking in amusement.
Hilary rushed off to tell Lionel who started the rehearsal in an embattled mood.
Bill Thackery, Lionel’s co-leader, predictably nicknamed ‘Makepeace’ because he was kind, equable and always defusing squabbles, had heard the shouting in the passage.
‘What’s up with L’Appassionata?’ he asked as Lionel took his seat beside him, ‘P.M.T.?’
‘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.
