Death on the High C's

by Robert Barnard

  ‘Buon giorno,’ said Signorina Contini to the first singer Mike introduced her to. And then, waving her arms and saying something that sounded like ‘No—I spick Ingliss!’ she changed her greeting to ‘Goo die’. It was all done with great good-humour, and Signor Pratelli, throughout the introductions, snuffled along in her wake, exuding concern and the Italian language. When the round of greetings had been made, Signorina Contini put down her handbag on a chair, looked around, and said: ‘And then—what we does?’

  The question gave Owen a chance to bustle forward and take charge, and perhaps to hide his uncertainty as to how he was going to deal with what looked like being an unexpectedly ticklish situation for him as producer.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we start with the Act I duets with Rigoletto, then those with the Duke—and in fact through to the end of the scene.’

  ‘Ah, “Caro nome”,’ said Giulia. ‘No—in Ingliss “Dearest nyme”.’

  ‘We’re doing it in Italian, actually, for the first few rehearsals, to break you in, so to speak,’ said Owen.

  Giulia took some time to digest this, then she made a gesture of dismissal, and still with the same air of invincible good-humour, she said: ‘No—is not necessary. I learns Ingliss for my career. I needs pracsis. We does in Ingliss.’

  Owen was never happy when his decisions were not accepted without dispute, but when he opened his mouth to argue the matter, he saw Mike Turner making an infinitesimal gesture to him from the other side of the room, and he shut his mouth hurriedly again. It had been impressed very forcibly on Owen that his chances of further productions with the company depended on keeping the visiting star happy.

  ‘OK, so be it—in English then,’ he said. ‘We’ll take it from the end of ‘Pari siamo’. The pulpit steps are the stairs to your bedroom, Signorina Contini, and you come down those to welcome your father home.’

  Giulia placed herself in the pulpit, and as Mr Pettifer finished Simon’s soliloquy and the music pressed irresistibly forward for the entry of Gilda, she tripped down the stairs—tripping is something Italian sopranos can always do, at least until the pasta takes its toll—and ran to embrace Rigoletto.

  ‘Gilda!’ sang Simon Mulley.

  ‘Ai-aa-a,’ sang Giulia Contini.

  ‘Daughter beloved! Thou art for me my only consolation,’ sang Simon.

  ‘Aa-er-ii-aa-er,’ sang Giulia.

  Mike Turner’s face, safely behind Giulia’s back, was a masterpiece of revealed emotion. It was the first big mistake of his directorship, but in the precarious position of the company very few mistakes could be allowed. And there was nothing anyone could do. It was too late to send Giulia for a crash course at the Berlitz School, and though Simon and Mr Pettifer very gently got together and made her say over her lines with the consonants inserted and the right sort of vowel sounds in the right places, any effect they had was quite transitory: after a line or so she went happily back to her glorious succession of odd-sounding diphthongs.

  And it soon became clear that it wasn’t just the words. Nobody except critics worries much about words. More than one international career has been built on a couple of vowel sounds. But the voice was—a nice little voice: a sweet, mellifluous instrument. A Mimi-voice.

  The English singers in the hall had rather liked their first view of Giulia Contini, but they would have been less than human if they had not felt some degree of insular satisfaction that the company already had in its midst a singer who could sing rings round the visiting star as Gilda—or for that matter as Mimi, or as anything else. Gaylene’s emotions, of course, were more mixed. She had been hoping that the arrival of Signorina Contini would knock all this Bridget-worship on the head, once and for all. That clearly wasn’t going to happen. On the other hand, no singer, least of all Gaylene, could resist a slight spasm of satisfaction if a fellow-artist turned out to be less talented than he had been cracked up to be.

  ‘I’m still the only first-rate voice in the company,’ she said in a loud whisper to Jim McKaid, who gave her the vitriolic look of an acknowledged second-rate voice.

  Acting-wise, things hardly went any better. Nobody expects Italian singers to be able to act, and Owen had looked forward to imposing his ideas on Giulia, to wenching some sort of a performance out of her. So he was not worried by her tiny repertoire of vague supplicatory gestures of the left hand, her clappings of the bosom with the right, the little bends at the knees before high notes. To drill into her a series of movements and gestures which would be a substitute for a real dramatic rendering of the part would be a great satisfaction to Owen. And he did indeed get somewhere momentarily when he tried to stop her looking continually and fixedly in the direction of the imaginary audience.

  ‘Where I look?’ said Giulia equably.

  ‘Look at your father,’ said Owen.

  ‘Oo?’ said Giulia.

  ‘Your father. Rigoletto.’

  ‘Oh—’im,’ said Giulia, and for the space of two seconds she looked mooningly at Simon, before turning back to the inevitable audience.

  Later in the duet, though, he met with more determined resistance. At the climax of the duet he asked her, as he had Bridget, to clasp her hands.

  ‘What?’ said Giulia.

  ‘Clasp your hands,’ said Owen, showing her.

  Giulia looked at him intently, tentatively intertwined her fingers, essayed a few notes, and then said: ‘I no clasp my ’ands.’

  Owen’s voice, in spite of all his care, rose a fraction.

  ‘Will you please try it for this rehearsal?’ he asked.

  ‘I no clasp my ‘ands,’ said Giulia flatly.

  For a moment Owen completely forgot who he was talking to, let the blood rush to his head, and let out the first tiny beginnings of a shout. Just in time he registered from the other side of the hall Mike Turner, whose gesturing was now much more obvious, and he also caught some Italian from Signor Pratelli which he took to mean ‘She no clasp ’er ’ands.’ He got a grip on himself, and let the rehearsal go forward.

  Calvin and Giulia did a pretty love-duet. Calvin was determined to show Gaylene that passion was not only to be expressed through sweaty clinches, so the passion he put into this duet was elegant, light, but full of feeling. Rehearsing with Bridget had helped, and perhaps watching Raymond Ricci with his succession of girl-friends over the past year had contributed something too, for whatever one thought about his morals, Raymond had a certain style. Giulia responded prettily but phlegmatically, and the frenzied success of ‘Addios’ that concluded the duet turned out comic rather than impassioned. Then Giulia ran through ‘Caro nome’—nicely, pathetically, with a generalized Puccinian emotion which was not quite what Verdi wanted. She ended with a trill that was little more than a vocal shiver. Then she let herself be abducted with the usual token resistance—a couple of kicks—and the scene ended with Jim McKaid making little of the hopeless part of Marullo, and Simon trying rather desperately to restore some dramatic life to things with the discovery that his daughter had gone.

  ‘Very nice, for a first run-through,’ said Owen, with quite uncharacteristic diplomacy.

  Gaylene, less of a diplomat, but more of a liar, went straight over to Giulia, took her by the arm in a gesture that said ‘we are the stars of this performance’, and said: ‘Nice to hear a voice with body to it. That’s a real lovely sound you make.’

  Giulia looked as if she did not know quite what to make of this, or even who this was, and merely murmured: ‘Grazie.’

  ‘I’m hoping we’re going to be able to put a bit of life into this production between us,’ continued Gaylene unperturbed. ‘They’re terribly inhibited this lot—they can’t give, know what I mean? I hope we’ll be able to give things a bit of go.’

  ‘Gow?’ said Giulia, frowning in bewilderment. Then, as if she took the word as an order, she detached herself from Gaylene’s elephantine confidentiality, and drifted off.

  Gaylene looked at her exasperatedly, and then with that rapid and com
plete change from one transparent emotion to another which was characteristic of her, she smiled in anticipated triumph, looked at her watch, and said: ‘Hell, it’s nearly twelve. I’ve got to go and get Hurtle.’

  As she made towards the door, Mike Turner looked in her direction perplexedly and said: ‘She’s got to go and get what?’ as though she had uttered an Australian obscenity he hadn’t heard before.

  ‘Hurtle,’ said Calvin. ‘We gather it’s a name. He’s her boy-friend, or fiancé or something.’

  ‘I don’t know that I like her bringing him along without so much as by-your-leave,’ said Owen.

  ‘Give us a break,’ said Calvin. ‘We’re all dying to see the lucky guy. You stop her and you’ll have an industrial dispute on your hands that will make Lord Harewood’s troubles look like the Teddy-bears’ picnic.’

  Giulia, meanwhile, had settled into a corner with Bridget, and together they were going through the English words of the part of Gilda. Bridget had enough Italian—albeit of a somewhat operatic, melodramatic kind—to fill in the gaps, the frequent gaps, where Giulia’s English failed, and she got some really useful work done. Within ten minutes they were bosom friends, in the manner of theatre people, and Giulia was insisting that she do a demonstration. The difficult phrase was ‘he awoke my first desire’, a phrase in ‘Caro nome’ which led to another rising phrase with a succession of trills which made the words particularly difficult to integrate into the vocal line. Bridget resisted for a time, with a realistic awareness of the strength of theatrical intimacies. Finally, after much solicitation, and thinking ‘this is the end of a beautiful friendship’, she closed her eyes and opened up.

  ‘He awoke my first desire’

  On the first note the rest of the hall went silent. Bridget was in particularly full, opulent voice. The trills were real trills, and they were miraculously well-placed and true. Now she’d done it, everybody thought. They waited for a reaction. As she finished, Giulia opened her eyes wide in pure pleasure.

  ‘Beautiful,’ she cried. ‘Is wonderful. Incredible. You go on, please go on.’

  Everyone was terribly disappointed. In spite of her protests, Bridget was forced to sing the next few phrases, taking the high notes at the return of the phrase ‘caro nome’ with swelling panache. Giulia took her hands in a gesture more uninhibitely operatic than anything she had produced during the rehearsal, kissed her on both cheeks, and said: ‘Is a great voice. You be a great star!’

  Signor Pratelli did not look too pleased, but everyone else had to admit that Giulia was either an unexpectedly good off-stage actress, or else a very nice girl indeed.

  Everyone, that is, except Gaylene.

  She had made an entrance two minutes before, with Hurtle in tow, and had watched the scene with anger and contempt. She contemplated pushing him out to make a second one, but deciding he would probably not be cooperative, she was forced to shove her way forward, dragging a sheepish Hurtle by the arm, and bellowing round: ‘Hey, this is my bloke.’

  After that, there didn’t seem much chance of any meaningful rehearsal that day. Gaylene, on the way to the bus stop to pick up Hurtle, had equipped herself with a leaning tower of paper cups and five bottles of an Australian red wine which was probably designed to show the Italian what real quality wine tasted like. As she took Hurtle from person to person, introducing each one as if they were the best friend she had in the world, she handed them a cup and said: ‘Be round in two ticks with the booze.’

  ‘This was meant to be a rehearsal, you know, Gaylene,’ said Mike Turner.

  ‘Stiff-necked lot,’ yelled Gaylene. ‘Well, now it’s meant to be a party.’

  Hurtle was a little apologetic about it all. He was a very large young man, in his mid-twenties, with a face set in an expression of imperturbable good-humour, only momentarily crossed by flickers of embarrassment at the proprietorial behaviour of Gaylene. Real life, for Hurtle, it seemed, began when the whistle went and play commenced. What happened off the field was a jolly game which he was quite prepared to amble through with great amiability, hoping that no one tried to take it seriously, or pretended that anything that happened beyond the touch-lines mattered in any way.

  ‘Jeez, Gay, I’m in training,’ he said, when she filled his paper cup with Penfold’s.

  ‘I should hope so,’ said Gaylene. ‘And I don’t mean for football, either.’

  From then on the rehearsal became an impromptu party, and Gaylene playing the hostess was a sight to behold. She charged around with noisy gaiety, bellowing to people to enjoy themselves, clinking paper cups in cheery toasts and shouting ‘skoal’ and ‘bottoms up’ to everyone in sight. Hurtle bumbled along in her wake for a bit, like a cowed dog, but when she had told people for the sixteenth time that he was ‘the best damned scrum-half in Australia,’ and had explained to him for the tenth time that you had to call it ‘rugby’ in this country, because ‘football is soccer, would you believe it?’ he showed a surprising nimbleness, and got out of her way, eventually ambling over in the direction of Bridget and Calvin.

  ‘Awfully lucky, your playing here while Gaylene is with the company,’ said Bridget, smiling.

  ‘Oh, Gay always manages to turn up somewhere or other,’ said Hurtle. ‘No getting away from Gay.’

  ‘Have you known each other long?’ asked Calvin.

  ‘Jeez yes,’ said Hurtle. ‘We were both at Coonabarrabran High. She was just Gay French then—with the ordinary old single capital F. We used to train together.’

  ‘Train?’

  ‘Gay was a great little hurdler, and a pretty good gymnast. She always had this weight problem, and she wouldn’t diet, so she never made the grade, but she was real neat.’

  ‘I would have made the grade too,’ bellowed Gaylene, who was yards away, but had long ears. ‘I just chose to concentrate on my singing instead.’

  ‘Poor old Gay,’ said Hurtle, turning back to Bridget and Calvin, ‘she never could bear to come second. Good job, really, she gave up: she’d have turned the Olympic Games into World War III.’

  ‘How long have you been engaged?’ said Bridget.

  ‘Engaged?’

  ‘Well, if Gay says so, that’s OK by me,’ said Hurtle with a look of unquenchable good-humour.

  ‘I suppose you’ll be hoping Gaylene could get in with the Elizabethan Theatre Trust,’ said Calvin. ‘So you could be together.’

  ‘Together?’

  ‘When you’re married.’

  ‘Oh gee,’ said Hurtle with a grin. ‘I don’t know as I’d go that far.’

  Gaylene had caught the reference to the Elizabethan Theatre Trust, and pushed her way over.

  ‘I can go back t’Australia any time I like,’ she said. ‘They’ve been putting out feelers for months.’ (She made it sound uniquely indecent.) ‘As a matter of fact I’m expecting a call any day now to the Sydney Opera House.’

  ‘Why, do they need someone to prop up the sails?’ said Hurtle, with a splendid, braying laugh.

  ‘Big joke, scunge,’ said Gaylene, giving him the sort of shove that would have sent a lesser man through the wall. But she seemed to put up with a lot more from Hurtle than she would from any other of her boy-friends. Perhaps it was the softening influence of their shared school-days.

  As the party wore on, and Gaylene became more imaginatively boastful, Hurtle became confidential with those he talked to.

  ‘You don’t want to take Gay too seriously,’ he said to Simon Mulley, who was watching him closely, as if studying him for some role in comic opera.

  ‘Oh, we don’t,’ Simon said.

  ‘Mostly, you see, she just says the first thing that comes into her head,’ said Hurtle.

  ‘Yes, we realize that,’ said Simon. He added, since Hurtle seemed so notably unbesotted a lover: ‘We just wish the first things were pleasanter than they usually are.’

  ‘Jeez, don’t we all?’ said Hurtle. ‘Of course, you’ve got to take a lot of what she says with a pinch of salt, you know.’<
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  ‘Yes—actually we had noticed that too,’ said Simon.

  ‘But there’s no harm in her,’ said Hurtle.

  ‘No,’ said Simon, and Hurtle caught the faintest hint of a rising, interrogative intonation.

  ‘Wouldn’t hurt a fly,’ he said earnestly. ‘Provided it didn’t get in her way.’

  At the other end of the hall Gaylene was speculating about her future prospects. A little group had collected around her, for singers are fascinated by other singers’ lies and fantasies, and can never quite rid themselves of the fear that they might be true.

  ‘Tell you the truth,’ Gaylene said, ‘I’m not sure I’ll go back to Sydney, not for a while yet anyways. You can’t really build an international career with Sydney as a base. And they’re mad to get me at the English National, you know.’

  ‘Really?’ said Raymond Ricci at his suavest. ‘What’s holding them back?’

  ‘There’s a lot of professional jealousy in the company,’ said Gaylene. ‘Among that drack lot of mezzos—natch. Some people don’t like healthy competition. But there’s a tremendous claque building up for me in the gallery.’

  ‘The Earl’s Court Yobboes,’ said Jim McKaid. ‘Lord Harewood would rather die than give way to that sort of mob.’

  ‘Or rather you died,’ said Raymond. ‘That’s an idea, you know. Can’t you just imagine Lord Harewood popping over from Harewood House, creeping up your darkened stairs that night, picking your lock, and turning on your gas-fire? No? Well, maybe not. Still, it’s a possibility to bear in mind.’

  ‘I’m surprised about being engaged to Gay,’ said Hurtle, sitting on the pulpit stairs and speaking a little tipsily, for he didn’t often break training, and the wine packed a thoroughly nasty punch. ‘I’d have thought she’d’ve got over that.’