Appassionata

by Jilly Cooper

  Gisela, despite being old and rheumaticky, hated to be helped. But Abby was desperate to prove her grip was getting stronger, so the moment breakfast was over, she stacked everything including Rodney’s tumbler onto the tray.

  ‘I’ll carry it.’ In alarm Rodney put down The Times.

  ‘I’m OK.’

  The next moment, Abby’s hand had slipped and everything had smashed into a hundred pieces on the flagstones.

  ‘Why the hell don’t you leave things alone?’ shouted Rodney.

  Too horrified to apologize, Abby stormed upstairs leaving the mess. Within seconds the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ was blaring out of her bedroom. And when Rodney stumped angrily upstairs to play with his trains, Abby had ostentatiously banged her windows shut to blot out the sound of shouting, whistling and hooting. Even when Shostakovich appeared mewing at the window Abby screamed at him to go away. He had a maddening habit of sitting on scores, or leaping onto her shoulders like a witch’s cat when she was giving her all to some elaborate aria.

  At one o’clock, she was playing ‘Worthy is the Lamb’ so loudly that she didn’t hear Gisela’s tentative knock, so Gisela let herself in. Always trying to tempt Abby to eat more, she had made her a pale pink smoked salmon soufflé, wild strawberry ice-cream, and had squeezed her a glass of her favourite pink-grapefruit juice. Also on the tray, which she placed on the table by the window, was a bowl of vitamins and a posy of mauve autumn crocuses.

  Abby went beserk.

  ‘For Chrissake, how many times do I have to tell you, I’ll come down when I want to eat.’

  Gisela’s kind, rosy face crumpled in dismay.

  Upstairs the 8.10 from Zurich ran into the 10.55 from Geneva with a crash, as Rodney toddled downstairs. His station-master’s cap, askew over his eye, did nothing to diminish the roaring rage on his face.

  ‘How dare you shout at Gisela like that, you spoilt brat! Everyone is falling over themselves to be nice to you. Gisela and I are going into Lucerne this afternoon and if you’re not in a better mood when we get home, you can pack your bags and get out.’

  Again, Abby was too distraught to apologize. But after they had gone she sobbed her hopelessly muddled heart out. How could she have been so ungrateful? God would punish her by never allowing her to play the violin again.

  ‘Oh please, what gets into me?’

  Wearily she picked up her stick and the battered yellow score of The Messiah. It was cheating to conduct to a record, and made her lazy and slow to adjust. Rodney’s musicians, if he hadn’t already told them not to turn up for such an ungrateful cow, would probably play it in a completely different way. She’d have to sing and imagine it in her head.

  Handel’s original version of The Messiah was scored for a very small orchestra and Abby had arranged her room so each instrument was represented by a different object. The bookshelf on her left was the First Violins, the chest of drawers next door the Second Violins. The faded crimson armchair the First Oboe, the trouser press the Second Oboe, the stuffed bear in the mitre seemed appropriately august to play both bassoons.

  Rodney’s beady Cousin Myrtle, gazing down between the windows, which looked on to the back garden, represented the violas. And Abby’s white-and-yellow four-poster, against the right-hand wall, which she hadn’t made yet, had to act as the harpsichord.

  The Messiah begins with the entire orchestra playing together loudly and gravely for twenty-four bars. Abby glared round the room to see that everyone was paying attention, paused and raised her baton. Rannaldini was said to have a down beat that could halve butter straight from the freezer. Abby was determined to be as incisive. One, her stick whistled downwards, two to the left, three to the right, and four in a sweeping quarter-circle back to one.

  At bar twenty-five after a diminuendo, the tempo changed and she had to cue in the crimson armchair and the chest of drawers after the first beat of the bar, and then bring in the bookshelf and the trouser press, followed four bars later by the stuffed bear, the four-poster and Rodney’s Cousin Myrtle. And all the time she had to sing the tune in a breathless soprano.

  Playing away for all their worth, the whole room reached bar ninety-seven, and the first recitative: ‘Comfort Ye . . .’ Beating eight quavers to the bar with her right hand, Abby exhorted the bookshelf, Cousin Myrtle, the chest of drawers and the four-poster to play slowly and quietly by shaking her left hand, still as rigid as a Dutch doll’s, downwards, as though she were drying her nails. Glancing round she nodded to her dark green bathrobe hanging on the door who was standing in as the tenor.

  ‘Comfort ye, comfo-ort ye-ee, my pee-eeple,’ sang Abby, quelling Cousin Myrtle with a death-ray glance for coming in too early. As she speeded up the tempo to walking pace for ‘Every Valley,’ she must remember the bassoons, who dodged about all over the place throughout the aria. Nor did she think the stuffed bear was capable of counting thirty-one bars between twiddles, should she forget to cue him in, but somehow they circumnavigated every ‘rough place and crooked straight’, to end with a splendid run of trills from the crimson armchair.

  ‘Well done, everyone,’ called Abby. ‘Try and be even more together.’

  Only the stuffed bear and Cousin Myrtle were looking at her, but in her experience most musicians didn’t bother to look much at conductors.

  And now for the first chorus, with a ten-bar allegro tutti, before she stretched out both hands to the gold trees in the orchard outside, who were playing the part of the chorus.

  ‘And the glory, the glory of the Lord,’ sang the alto apple trees.

  ‘Terrific, wonderful,’ Abby urged them on. ‘Oh wow,’ she added as she cued in the plums, the, pears and an ancient quince tree, to bring in the basses, sopranos and tenors. It seemed right that such a pretty delicate tree as the pear should sing soprano.

  Oh thank God, it was all coming good.

  ‘And all flesh shall see it together,’ encouraged the apple trees.

  Abby worked on frenziedly until the light started fading. She was just about to embark on ‘A Trumpet Shall Sound’, which required a solo trumpet, when she noticed a candidate had rolled up in the form of Shosty who was back, mewing piteously, rubbing his fur against the window pane. She’d been so foul to him earlier. Putting down her baton, Abby opened the window. Leaping onto her shoulder, Shosty smelt of thyme and marjoram, he must have been hunting at the bottom of the mountain.

  For a second he purred round her neck, a grey muffler, louder than any percussion player, then jumped onto the table to lick up the butter that had escaped from the smoked salmon soufflé.

  Although her wrist ached dreadfully, a great peace swept over Abby. She’d had such a good afternoon’s work. How could she have been so foul to Gisela and Rodney? It was she who needed her rough places planed with the most vicious sandpaper. She’d go into Lucerne tomorrow and buy Gisela that new winter coat she’d been talking about.

  Abby wandered over to the front window. The sun had set, leaving the lake a drained vermilion. The snowy mountains opposite had turned dark pink like summer or rather autumn puddings, as they rose out of their gold ruff of woods. To the left she could see the island where Hans Richter had practised his French horn. There were no horns in The Messiah. If only some wonderful musician could row over from the island to woo her. She was almost resigned to the loss of Christopher, she no longer jumped with hope each time the telephone rang or the post arrived. But she felt overwhelmed with sadness, like the Marschallin in Der Rosencavalier, that something she had so cherished had gone for ever.

  She jumped as Shosty, bored by salmon flavoured butter, joined her on the window-ledge, weaving against her. Putting out an idle hand to stroke him, Abby froze, whipping back her hand as though she had had some fearful electric shock; then she put it back, held it there and began to tremble violently. There was no doubt, she could feel the faint tickling of his fur against her palm. Pressing down gently she could feel the hardness of his backbone, and running her hand to the left encountered t
he ramrod straightness of his tail. Then she rubbed the hopelessly wasted ball of her thumb against him. No feeling there yet, nor in her fingertips. Still shaking, she put her palm down again; she could definitely feel his fur moving.

  The next moment, the front door banged.

  Gathering up Shosty, she raced downstairs screaming with excitement.

  Rodney was standing in the doorway still in his station-master’s cap, smiling guiltily. He’d spent far too much money on, among other things, a new train set. Gisela, as though catching the last rays of the sun, was proudly wearing a new red overcoat.

  ‘Oh Rodney, oh Gisela,’ screamed Abby.

  ‘Darling, you look happier,’ said Rodney, who never harboured grudges.

  On the way down the last flight, Abby lost Shosty, who, indignant at being carted in such a noisy and unseemly fashion, wriggled out of her arms and flounced off to the kitchen.

  ‘I can feel, I can feel, I can feel Shosty’s fur on my hand,’ whooped Abby, going straight into Gisela’s arms. ‘I’m sorry I’ve been such a bitch, I was so scared.’

  Gisela could feel Abby’s face soaked with tears, and her desperate thinness. Her ribs were protruding like an old-fashioned radiator.

  ‘There, there,’ she stroked Abby’s heaving shoulder, ‘you will get best now.’

  Putting down his parcels, Rodney took Abby’s hand and kissed the palm.

  ‘Can you feel that?’

  ‘I can feel your beard tickling more than Shosty’s fur.’ Abby was between tears and laughter. ‘I’m gonna play the violin again.’

  ‘Richter and Wagner shared half a bottle of champagne when Wagner wrote the last bar of The Mastersingers,’ said Rodney happily. ‘We all deserve a nice bottle of Krug.’

  Appassionata

  FIRST MOVEMENT

  NINE

  Abby worked for nearly two more years in Lucerne before moving to London to take a conducting course at the Royal Academy of Music. A solid roan-and-white Edwardian building, the Academy stands in the Marylebone Road, flanked by plane trees. The autumn term had already begun, but London was enjoying a very hot Indian summer. Few members of the Academy’s orchestra, red-faced from lugging heavy instruments, noticed the ‘Viva L’Appassionata’ poster hanging from the flagpole as they scuttled in through the glass front door.

  Inside, anticipation had reached fever pitch. Since her attempted suicide, Abby had achieved cult status among students who collected her old records and pinned up her posters, portraying her in her tempestuous gypsy beauty. In a materialistic world, she had sacrificed all for love.

  In the foyer, therefore, an unusual number of students, who should have been at their various classes, pretended to read notices about scholarships and forthcoming concerts. Such was the excitement that one half expected the antique fiddles to break out of their glass case and offer Abby their services, or Sir Henry Wood in his red robes to shout ‘Bravo’ from his portrait in an ante-room.

  As the clock edged towards a quarter past ten, and there was no sign of her, the students reluctantly dispersed, except for a tall boy wearing a navy-blue baseball cap to dry his hair flat, and a girl with a dark red bob, who was scornfully reading a letter which had been pinned to the notice-board:

  Dear Musicians,

  Thank you for making music with me so delightfully. I must congratulate the Academy on a super orchestra.

  With great pleasure

  Hermione Harefield

  ‘Stupid cowpat,’ muttered the girl, and getting out a biro she wrote: PS. If David, the hunky First Trombone, wants to pop in to the Old Mill, Paradise, he’ll be most welcome to a bed for the afternoon.

  ‘Flo-rah, stop it,’ chided the boy. ‘You’re going to be seriously late.’

  ‘Oh, all right.’ Grabbing her viola case, Flora hop-scotched across the black-and-white checked floor slap into her teacher.

  ‘Why the hell aren’t you warming up?’ he said furiously. ‘I put my head on the block putting you forward for this, don’t you dare let me down.’

  ‘Yes Mr French, sorry Mr French, promise to do my best, Mr French.’

  Flora scampered off into the Duke’s Hall where gold-framed portraits of illustrious former students looked down from paprika-red walls on to a packed audience of students, parents, teachers and talent scouts.

  Two friends had kept a seat in the back row for the boy in the baseball cap. Flora sauntered up onto the stage where the Academy orchestra, grumbling about the cold after the sunshine outside, were tuning up, practising difficult solos and runs in different directions like skaters. Both sexes were huddled in sweaters and trousers, wore clumpy shoes or trainers and no make-up. The only way you could distinguish the girls was by their long flowing undyed hair, which was mostly drawn back from high clear foreheads, although a few, in Abby’s honour, had turned up with wild Appassionata gypsy curls.

  The object today was for this year’s student conductors, who sat in a nervous nail-biting row behind the horns, to try out their skills on the Academy orchestra in the first movement of Bartók’s Viola Concerto.

  Flora was playing the solo and she and the musicians had endlessly to repeat the same bits as one conductor after another fumblingly attempted to control the orchestra and were repeatedly taken apart by a genial but highly critical professor, who sat in the second desk of the second violins with a score making notes.

  The Bartók concerto is extremely difficult, and with all the stopping and starting, the timpanist, the percussion and the brass (including Hermione’s hunky trombone player) had very little to do, except count bars between the occasional flurry of notes, which they often missed because the conductors forgot to bring them in.

  ‘You’re not keeping the orchestra down enough,’ shouted the professor to a sweating Swede, who was flapping on the rostrum as though he were about to fly through the vaulted roof. ‘We can’t hear Flora.’

  ‘Just as well,’ Flora grinned at the Japanese leader, who had a lean beautiful body and a face like a Red Indian. ‘It’s the cadenza next. I’ll need scaffolding and oxygen to reach that top A. What the hell’s happened to L’Appassionata?’

  To fox any press who had in fact been humiliatingly non-existent, Abby had been smuggled in by a back door. Shivering behind dark glasses, dying of nerves, she was dickering whether to rush out and be sick again. How could she do justice to such a beautiful piece, particularly when the orchestra were only playing it for the first time?

  The soloist, Abby decided, was extremely good. She needed to work on her technique; she ground to a halt twice in the cadenza, and burst out laughing when during a really sad bit she’d caught a friend’s eye in the audience, but generally she executed the high notes effortlessly and joyfully and in the lower register the sound was mellow, dark and mysterious.

  She was also extremely attractive. Her figure was hidden by baggy black trousers and a thick black cardigan, but she had a clear pale gold skin, merry green eyes, a plump face ending in a pointed chin and her shining bob was the same warm burnt-sienna as her viola.

  Above all, she played with total insouciance keeping up a stream of badinage with the orchestra, chewing gum and reading her tattered poetry book every time there was a pause. Now she was sitting on the lean thigh of the Japanese leader awaiting the next victim, a plump Greek called Adonis, who had soft white hands and gold teeth to match his gold corduroy shirt. All his friends trooped round behind the brass section to video him conducting.

  ‘Like photographing the captain of the Titanic,’ murmured Flora, getting to her feet.

  Sweat was glistening on her upper lip, a russet lock had fallen away from the tortoiseshell slide. There was a chorus of wolf-whistles as she took off her black cardigan to reveal a dark green T-shirt embroidered with yellow daisies and tucked into a wide leather belt.

  ‘Vy d’you have to distract me viz striptease?’ grumbled Adonis. ‘Now don’t vorry, I vill follow you.’

  ‘I don’t vant you following me, I want you with m
e,’ said Flora, raising her viola.

  Adonis tried very hard, but the orchestra were all over the place. The genial professor sighed. He was going to have his work cut out with this lot.

  That soloist is smart, thought Abby wistfully. Adonis was now going much too fast, but she always caught up.

  Glancing sideways, she noticed the boy with the baseball cap. Totally still, really listening, he followed every note Flora played. What a beauty, thought Abby, he’s the one who ought to be called Adonis.

  A punch-up was narrowly avoided because Adonis skipped another page and missed out the hunky trombonist’s last entry yet again.

  Abby, who’d been studying the concerto for the last fortnight, couldn’t bear to hear it so butchered. But would she do any better? The notes of the score swum meaninglessly before her eyes. Oh God, she hoped she wasn’t going to be sick again.

  Adonis was followed by Lorenzo, a handsome Italian who made beautiful gestures, but who seemed more interested in ogling Flora and the video cameras.

  ‘This one’s got two left hands,’ murmured the professor as Lorenzo kept smoothing his hair with his right hand.

  ‘You’ve occasionally got to beat in time, Lorenzo,’ he called out. ‘No matter how emotional you feel, you’ve got to first and foremost be a traffic policeman so the orchestra can follow and know where they are, particularly in a piece with so many changes of tempo.’

  ‘I try again.’

  This time extravagant waving and fists clenched to heaven were followed by four bars of total silence.

  ‘Where am I?’ Lorenzo smote his noble brow.

  ‘In the Duke’s Hall,’ giggled Flora.

  ‘You’re lost,’ said the professor.

  ‘But not forgotten.’ Parking her chewing-gum on the side of the rostrum, Flora gave Lorenzo a kiss.

  ‘That is a disgusting habit, Flora,’ reproved the professor.