Appassionata

by Jilly Cooper

  It was so mild that people in the surrounding flats opened their windows, wrapping their children in duvets, so they could all listen to Marcus until the stars came out, clapping and cheering whenever he stopped and shouting for him to go on.

  ‘Audience don’t do zat for me,’ grumbled Boris. ‘But he is good boy,’ he confided to Abby, ‘I teach him piano at school. Ven Rachel die he turn up at the house asking what he could do, looking after kids, helping me sort things out. He is gentle, but he is not at all vimp and he play like dream.’

  Abby, a bit drunk now, was equally enchanted but also tearful. She must not neglect her physio.

  Having dispatched the Grande Polonnaise with a great flourish, Marcus got out more music and launched into a modern piece, explosions of crashing notes, interspersed with a sad, haunting tune.

  ‘That’s beautiful,’ called out Abby. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Ees familiar.’ Boris looked perplexed.

  ‘Bloody well should be,’ said Marcus. ‘It’s part of the “Dies Irae” from Rachel’s Requiem. I finished transcribing it last night.’

  ‘I wrote that?’ Boris leapt to his feet. ‘Play it again. Where’s my violin?’

  ‘Under the sofa,’ said Flora.

  Impatiently Boris tuned up and began to play the main tune with Marcus accompanying. Marcus’s copying was dark and clear which made it very easy to read.

  Having Jewish blood like Abby, Boris tended to soup up the melody, playing very emotionally with great rhetorical gestures.

  ‘This is very grateful piece,’ he told Abby and Flora in delight.

  ‘You mean rewarding,’ corrected Flora. ‘Yes, it’s breathtaking. Like Bartók, “full of hitherto undreamed of possibilities”.’

  Occasionally stopping to change a note, totally absorbed, they played on.

  ‘Marcus is seriously good,’ Abby told Flora. ‘Nothing can stop him making it.’

  ‘Let’s make some coffee,’ Flora led Abby into the kitchen.

  ‘Marcus is happy and relaxed at the moment,’ she went on, ‘because he’s among friends and he’s had the odd drink but he’s crippled by nerves, throwing up for hours before concerts, and he’s already had to cancel two recitals because of asthma attacks, which doesn’t help in the music world, which hates unreliability.

  ‘Shall we wash up?’ Flora looked unenthusiastically at the supper plates.

  But, as the dish-washer was still working overtime, gurgling away cleaning all the silver and china they’d unearthed from the sitting-room, she decided to leave it.

  ‘Nothing ever gets clean that I wash by hand.’

  After some rootling around she found a tin of Gold Blend in the breadbin and, unable to find a spoon, shook some coffee into four cups.

  ‘Also,’ she added, switching on the kettle, ‘Marcus has a terrible hang-up about Rupert, who doesn’t see the point of him at all.’

  ‘But Rupert seemed so caring in BA,’ said Abby perplexed. ‘And when he visited me in the hospital.’

  ‘Rupert’s dazzling,’ agreed Flora, ‘but the brighter the moon, the darker the shadow it casts and it’s no fun being son of Superstud. Rupert’s always preferred Tabitha, Marcus’s younger sister, and he passionately disapproves of his son and heir taking up anything as drippy as the piano, when he should be at home learning how to run the estate.’

  ‘How did it turn out with those kids Rupert adopted?’

  ‘That’s the worst part,’ sighed Flora. ‘I’m afraid there’s no milk. Rupert’s totally besotted with the boy, Xavier, cured his squint and nearly his birthmark, got him racing round on Lysander’s old Shetland pony. Rupert’s got the tearaway he’s always wanted,’ Flora lowered her voice. ‘It’s crucified Marcus.’

  Returning to the living-room, Abby heard a voluptuous explosion of notes, and gave a cry of joy. Marcus was playing Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata.

  ‘It’s so darling, to play that – well – sort of in my honour.’ She went over to the piano.

  ‘Sort of,’ Marcus blushed, being a truthful boy. ‘Next week I’m also playing it in a recital at college.’

  ‘I’ll come along,’ said Abby in excitement, making Marcus blush even more darkly. ‘Did you know that to understand the Appassionata, Beethoven said you have to read The Tempest?

  This music crept by me upon the waters,

  Allaying both their fury, and my passion,

  With its sweet air.’

  Marcus nodded. ‘My stepfather told me, and quoted the same lines. Sorry,’ as a flurry of wrong notes resulted, ‘I’m no good at talking and playing.’

  Abby retreated to the sofa.

  ‘God, my back aches,’ said Flora, who was plaiting Boris’s hair. ‘Three hours of Bartók takes it out of you.’

  ‘I’ve got some Ibuleve in the bathroom,’ said Boris.

  A smell of bonfires was still drifting in through the open window. Glancing at his watch Marcus saw it was nearly eleven o’clock. They were still clamouring for more in the flats outside. He’d better stop soon or the kids would never get to bed. He launched into Roger Quilter’s Children’s Overture.

  ‘There was a lady loved a swine,’ sang Flora, as she returned with the Ibuleve.

  That’s a stunning voice, too, thought Abby in envy. Goodness they were a talented trio!

  Flora slumped between Boris’s knees, calmly pulling off her daisy-embroidered T-shirt and using it to cover high, pointed breasts, as Boris began to rub the gel into her shoulders.

  And I wonder what their relationship is, thought Abby.

  Glancing across the room as he launched into ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’ Marcus met Abby’s eyes, saw the admiration in them and thought how lovely she looked, her strong, proud face softened by the lamplight. She was much more boyish than he’d expected. Sitting on the sofa, her long legs tucked underneath her, she looked like a model for Gentleman’s Quarterly.

  Marcus’s timidity with women had been exacerbated two years ago at the stag-party of Basil Baddington, one of his father’s wilder cronies. Rupert, irked by Marcus’s apparent lack of interest in girls (after all, he was supposed to produce an heir one day), had organized a hooker.

  Marcus had been quite unable to get it up and had been violently sick. Terror, which makes people take deeper breaths, triggered off a violent asthma attack, which could have been fatal. The whole thing was hushed up by Rupert’s GP, the admirably unflappable James Benson, who got Marcus onto a nebulizer at the local hospital just in time.

  Before he’d lost consciousness, miserably aware of regurgitated wine all down his dress-shirt, Marcus had heard James Benson reproving his father.

  ‘You must be more careful with him, Rupert, you know he’s never been strong.’

  By mutual agreement neither Taggie nor Marcus’s mother had been told of this disaster, but Marcus’s relationship with Rupert, always shaky, had inevitably deteriorated.

  Reluctant to witness the love he had always craved, so unstintingly lavished on little Xavier, Marcus had avoided Pensombe and concentrated on his career. Girls, except Flora who was more of a pal, were avoided even though they chased him like mad, not least because of his father’s bank balance.

  Last night after copying out Boris’s score until long after midnight, Marcus had collapsed into bed, only to be jolted by a terrifyingly erotic dream about Boris, and woken, sobbing his heart out because it could never be possible.

  Having dreaded confronting Boris today, he was ecstatic to find himself suddenly so attracted to Abby. His blue shirt was still stiff from the salt of the tears she’d shed outside Madame Tussauds. All this added radiance to his playing.

  ‘Who did Marcus’s mother marry?’ asked Abby, thinking of the stepfather who had quoted The Tempest.

  ‘Malise Gordon, thirty years older,’ replied Flora, writhing half in ecstasy, half in pain under Boris’s fingers. ‘He’s been a brilliant stepfather and really encouraged Marcus, but that doesn’t make up for one’s own father not giving a toss.
’

  Flora suddenly shivered. They had been so wrapped up in talking they hadn’t realized how cold it had become. As she banged down the big sash window the telephone rang. It was Helen, Marcus’s mother, in hysterics. It was a few moments before Boris could get any sense out of her. Malise had had a massive stroke and been rushed to hospital. Marcus must go home at once.

  TWELVE

  Marcus drove straight home to Warwickshire. He was bitterly ashamed afterwards that his main emotion was despair that he would probably have to duck out of a recital yet again, and disappointment that he would no longer be faced with the terrifying yet magical prospect of Abby in the audience. He wasn’t even very worried about Malise who, never having let him down, seemed unlikely to start now.

  In fact Malise never regained consciousness. Marcus was devastated. He had loved his stepfather deeply. Kind, formal, old enough to be his grandfather, Malise had always encouraged him. They had played endless duets together; Malise had explained harmony, taken Marcus to concerts and shared with him his 78s of Myra Hess and Denis Matthews and Solomon. He had also provided him with a role model of total integrity and honour.

  But Marcus had to surpress his anguish in order to comfort his mother who, having been adored and wrapped in cotton wool by Malise for sixteen years, was quite incapable of coping with funerals, let alone life, on her own.

  The Press, of course, had a field-day dredging up the old story of how Malise as chef d’équipe had held the British Show-Jumping Team together during their golden era, and how during the LA Olympics, when Rupert Campbell-Black’s great rival, Jake Lovell, had run off with Rupert’s wife, Helen, the team had gone on with one man short to win the gold. There was also a lot of guff about how Malise had picked up the pieces, marrying Helen and restoring her self-confidence, which had been shattered by eight years of hell married to Rupert, and a disastrous few weeks with a miserably dispossessed Jake, who couldn’t wait to belt back to his wife.

  The funeral was rather like a rerun of Madame Tussauds with all the show-jumping greats rolling up to pay their last respects and Rupert and Jake glaring into space.

  As a further insult, Jake had brought along his son Isaac, a brilliant young jockey, who had beaten one of Rupert’s horses earlier that week. The only thing that could have redressed the balance for Rupert would have been if Marcus could have played Malise’s favourite Bach Prelude quite beautifully on the Steinway that Helen had insisted on hiring for the service.

  But Marcus’s asthma always grew worse under stress and, in the panic of overseeing all the last-minute arrangements, he forgot to bring his inhaler. He just managed to help carry the coffin the three hundred yards across the village green to the church before collapsing fighting for breath beside his mother.

  Helen was still young enough at forty-four to be described as ‘absolutely stunning’ rather than ‘having been absolutely stunning’. She was far too unnerved at seeing Jake again after all those years, and wondering guiltily if she were wearing too much blusher and eyeshadow on the grounds that Malise would have wanted her to look beautiful, to notice Marcus’s plight.

  Unfortunately a church filled with flowers and the fumes from the ancient pew, which had recently been treated for woodworm, made the band round Marcus’s chest even tighter.

  Rupert’s best friend, Billy Lloyd-Foxe, had reduced everyone to tears, including himself, reading the ‘Dedication to the Horse’, which always brought the house down at the end of the Horse of the Year Show. According to the service sheet Marcus should have been next but, white and sweating, he could only clutch his chest and shake his head, so, after a long agonizingly embarrassed pause, the parson, who had been a family friend for years, twigged what was up and carried on with the service.

  Marcus was only aware of the reproach in his mother’s eyes.

  ‘I didn’t break down, I didn’t fail, Malise,’ she seemed to be saying and such a public failure would only confirm Rupert’s conviction that his son totally lacked big-match temperament.

  Marcus had also been incapable of carrying the coffin to the graveside. Staggering back to the beautiful Queen Anne rectory in which Malise had lived all his life, revived by several squirts from his inhaler, he had been able to hand round drinks and sandwiches. There had been a horrible fascination in being introduced by Helen to Jake Lovell. He was amazed his mother could have left his gilded glamorous father for anyone so small and insignificant.

  And then Rupert had walked into the room, caught the three of them talking and stalked right out of the house dragging a protesting Taggie and Tabitha with him.

  Returning to the kitchen for more sandwiches Marcus had found Malise’s big-boned tactless daughter, who’d been brought up in the Old Rectory and whose eyes were now running over the furniture like beetles, wondering what she could claw back.

  ‘The boy’s not going to be much support to Helen,’ she was saying to Mrs Edwards, Helen’s daily. ‘Sickly looking fellow. Daddy did so much for him.’

  And Marcus had wanted to shout: ‘I loved him, too.’

  But the funeral was only the beginning of the nightmare. Malise had left his desk and everything else in order. To quote his favourite writer Montaigne, he had been ‘booted and spurred and ready to depart’. He had also hidden his worries from Helen so well that she’d had no idea how badly he’d been hit by Lloyd’s. He had made the Old Rectory and its twenty acres over to Helen, but not lived the necessary seven years to avoid estate duties. What little money was left would be eaten up paying the Lloyd’s losses.

  Helen was so distraught Marcus felt he had to give up his London digs and stay with her at least for the autumn term. Helen managed to justify this sacrifice as not being too great. It would be so much better for Marcus’s asthma living in the country and commuting to London for his weekly lessons, and at least it would get him away from that trampy Flora.

  Helen was too self-centred to realize how upset Marcus was by Malise’s death. She had always lacked the gift of intimacy and been admired rather than liked. Now, for the first time in her life, she felt popular and absolutely amazed by everyone’s kindness: the wonderful letters, the solicitous telephone calls, the invitations to stay, the quiches and apple-turnovers left in the porch: Dear Helen you must eat!

  But once this stream of sympathy dried up and she no longer had the funeral to plan, Helen sunk into apathy. Terrified of becoming addicted she refused to take tranquillizers or sleeping-pills, or even a stiff drink to get her through the increasingly dark winter evenings.

  She had never got on with her daughter Tabitha, who was still at boarding-school, who spent all her time at Penscombe with Rupert and Taggie; Marcus and his career therefore became all she had to live for. Marcus felt the millstone of her dark cloying love weighing him down and once again was ashamed of longing so much for all the fun of his London life with Flora, Boris and now Abby. The piano seemed to be his only refuge.

  Meanwhile, over in New York, Rannaldini had not been enjoying the domination over the New World Symphony Orchestra he had hoped for, possibly because his musicians were in revolt that he earned a hundred times more in a night than they did in a week. He was still having gruelling battles with the unions and endless lawsuits had been brought by unfairly sacked musicians. There was also the unread pile of unsolicited manuscripts and far too much contemporary music to programme and no Boris to weed out and translate it for him any more.

  Two and a half years on, Rannaldini was also still brooding on how he could get his revenge on Rupert, for orchestrating the break-up of his marriage to Kitty and hijacking his plane in BA.

  ‘The elm is a patient tree,’ murmured Rannaldini, ‘it hateth and waiteth.’

  A few days after Malise’s death Rannaldini was lunching on oysters and seafood salad in his penthouse flat which was papered with platinum discs and photographs of himself with the famous and which overlooked the tawny autumnal beauty of Central Park.

  Picking up The Times which was flown out t
o him every day from London, Rannaldini observed that another wife was standing by her cabinet minister husband. The photograph had been cropped at waist level, but Rannaldini felt sure the wife had a stiletto heel in her husband’s Gucci toe-cap and a knee in his groin despite the linked arms and the frenetically smiling faces. Kitty had not stood by him – the bitch.

  Turning the pages, easing a piece of squid out of his back teeth, Rannaldini discovered Malise’s obituary, a glow job describing his brilliant war, his knowledge of paintings, his work on the flute and his skill as a chef d’équipe where he was the only person who could harness the genius of Rupert Campbell-Black.

  He is survived by a second wife and one daughter from his first marriage, read Rannaldini, pouring himself another glass of Pouilly-Fumé.

  He could remember the exquisite Helen at a school concert, definitely one of Rupert’s finest thoroughbreds, an earnest intellectual snob, thirty years younger than her upright second husband and in need of a little excitement.

  Smiling, Rannaldini took out a piece of dove-grey writing-paper, and picked up his jade-green fountain-pen. He wrote in green ink:

  My dear Helen, (may I?)

  Please forgive my presumption but going through some old newspapers which I hadn’t had time to read, I found The Times obituary of your husband.

  What an extraordinary fine-looking, multi-talented man. I had no idea that the M. M. Gordon, who wrote, to my mind, the definitive work on the flute, was married to you. I would so like to have met him.

  You won’t remember but we met briefly when your son accompanied my daughter Natasha when she sang ‘Hark, Hark the Lark’ at a Bagley Hall concert a few years ago. He showed immense promise. I hope he has taken up the piano as a career.

  You must be utterly desolate but please comfort yourself. As Voltaire wrote—

  Rannaldini sighed with pleasure. Helen would love Voltaire, but he decided to translate the poem, Americans weren’t too hot on French.