by Jilly Cooper
Abby was too worried about next week’s concert and her even more revolutionary plans to re-audition the entire and often frightful Rutminster Choir before the German Requiem in June, really to take in George’s appointment.
Wrestling with the complexities of the last movement of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, she had only fallen into bed at five o’clock by which time the dawn chorus, who sang infinitely better than the Rutminster Choir, had started. She was woken by a maid coming in to clean the room at nine-thirty. Leaping out of bed, she frantically tugged on yesterday’s sweaty clothes. Racing down the High Street, she reached the auditorium at seven minutes to ten, only to find the place deserted. Unlike American orchestras, British players had a maddening habit of scuttling in at the last moment. As a final insult, Viking wandered in yawning at half-past ten.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ he smiled unrepentantly at Abby. ‘I was having a helicopter lesson and I couldn’t find anywhere to park. Hi, sweetheart.’ He paused on the way to kiss the Steel Elf.
Incensed because the French horns start the Fifth Symphony, Abby proceeded to dock half an hour off Viking’s pay, which triggered off the orchestra. She had vowed to be accommodating today and as a joke had even circulated a photostat of a dictionary definition of the word, pianissimo, to all the brass section to stop them drowning everyone else. But they had merely made paper darts and thrown them back at her.
Lionel the leader, who should have supported Abby, made no attempt to hush the chat that rose like a fountain whenever there was a pause. Now he asked if he might have a word. Abby jumped down from the rostrum, acutely conscious of her scruffy appearance and dirty hair beside Lionel’s coiffeured glamour. Even his breath smelt of peppermint, as he said: ‘Look, we’ve recorded this symphony with Rodney and Ambrose. If you want to get through it, just sit on top of the orchestra and coast.’
‘And leave you in charge, no, thank you,’ snapped Abby.
Lionel and Hilary exchanged told-you-so shrugs.
Two minutes later Abby called a halt.
‘Excuse me, flutes, you were dragging a little.’
‘You amaze me,’ Juno lowered her long blond eyelashes, ‘we were only following you.’
Ignoring the jibe, Abby tried to inspire them by telling them of Sibelius’s emotions when he wrote the symphony, but they all started yawning.
‘As you know the last movement ends with the six huge hammer blows of the God Thor,’ persisted Abby.
‘My back’s thore after all those semi-quavers,’ said a voice from the back of the violas.
‘Cut out the programme notes and get on with it,’ shouted Randy.
Dixie got out a porn mag.
Abby’s messianic streak emerged five minutes later when the horns launched into a glorious swinging tune.
‘This is a great euphoric affirmation of hope,’ she said earnestly, ‘which Sibelius wrote after he discovered that he wasn’t dying of cancer, after all, so I want you horns to play as though the sun was bursting through dark clouds and . . .’
Viking let her run on for a minute, before looking up.
‘You mean you want it louder,’ he drawled.
The orchestra cracked up.
‘No, I do not,’ screamed Abby. ‘I want you to play with more passion, and build up to a splendid sforzando.’
‘It says fortissimo in my score.’
‘Oh for God’s sake, let’s get on.’
Nellie Nicholson, the orchestra nymphomaniac, was a third desk cellist whose cello was nicknamed ‘Lucky’ by the male musicians. Five minutes later she came in loudly in one of the long pauses between the final hammer blows.
‘Sorry, sorry, Abby,’ she called out apologetically. ‘A fly landed on my score and I played it by mistake.’
Again the orchestra cracked up.
Abby totally lost her cool.
‘What in hell’s the matter with you guys?’
‘You are,’ piped up a voice from the back of the violas.
Abby couldn’t detect the offender who was hidden by Fat Isobel, who was even larger than Fat Rosie. Fat Isobel had a big jaw, and always looked as though she’d cleaned the grill pan with her hair. Despite this, on last year’s tour of the Oman, lots of Arabs had seriously tried to buy Isobel. Leaping down, barging between the second violins and violas, somehow circumnavigating Fat Isobel, Abby found Clare, the orchestra Sloane, and Candy, her best friend, from Australia, both ravishing blondes, playing battleships and discussing their sex life.
‘You will not hide behind Isobel,’ stormed Abby.
As she yanked their music-stand into view, the viola part of Sibelius’s Fifth fluttered to the floor.
‘Excuse me, Maestro,’ Steve Smithson, the RSO’s union rep, was beside her in a trice, breathing fire. ‘It’s Mr Charlton and the stage hands’ job to move the music-stands. If you observe Rule 223,’ he brandished the book under her nose.
For a second he and Abby glared at each other. Behind him Abby could see Nicholas, the orchestra manager, bald head bobbing like a buoy at sea, as he hopped from one foot to another in the wings, terrified at the prospect of a walk-out before the concert.
Wearily, Abby climbed back onto the rostrum.
‘Let’s play the last page again, and no-one is to come in between hammer blows.’
‘With respect, Maestro,’ said Lionel silkily, ‘it’s half-past eleven,’ and was nearly knocked sideways by junior members of the various sections and a barking Mr Nugent racing out to be first in the tea queue.
Abby slumped in the conductor’s room, burning face in her hands. Having had no time to put on a deodorant, she could smell last night’s sweat, now sour with fear. Dipping a towel in cold water, she rubbed it under her armpits, then groaned as she glanced in the mirror, the rust jersey was far too hot and clashed with her hectic red cheeks, her hair rose like Strewel Peter. She knew the orchestra were trying to goad her into resigning. She mustn’t be beaten.
Outside she could hear the cuckoo. Beyond the park, over the palest green rolling fields of barley, she could see the Blackmere Woods and knew what she must do. Splashing her face with cold water, she picked up her stick with resolve.
The second half went better. The horns and trumpets were swinging joyfully like monkeys in the jungle through the glorious heroic tune. The bows of the string players were a blur, they were going so fast.
But, as Abby paused to improve the ensemble playing of the Second Violins, little Claude ‘Cherub’ Wilson put up his hand.
Cherub, Second Percussion, had blond curls and blue eyes and hardly looked old enough to be playing in a primary-school band.
All the orchestra adored him. Miss Priddock baked him cakes. Even the Celtic Mafia allowed him to travel in their car to concerts to act as Court Jester. He was now sitting in the percussion seat behind Viking.
‘Scuse me, Miss Rosen.’
‘Yes Cherub,’ Abby’s face softened.
‘You know that bit in the first movement?’
Abby picked up the score and patiently started to leaf back through the pages.
‘Which bit, Cherub?’
‘The bit when the horns come in an’ the trumpets an’ the strings.’
‘There are a lot of bits like that.’
Cherub leant forward, consulting Viking’s score.
‘I found it a minute ago, it goes, la, la, la, la, la, la, la,’ he sung in a shrill falsetto, ‘or maybe it’s la, la, la, la, la, la.’
The orchestra were clutching their sides.
‘Don’t laugh at Cherub,’ snapped Abby. ‘I know that bit,’ she flipped more pages. ‘Here it is. But you’re not even playing,’ she cried in outrage, then realizing she’d been hoodwinked, ‘in fact there’s no percussion in this symphony.’
‘I know,’ Cherub beamed at her. ‘But it’s a nice bit, isn’t it? We do like nice bits you know; can you play it again?’
‘No, we flaming can’t,’ Abby contemplated hurling her score at him, but she couldn’t throw th
at far.
Quivering with rage, she clutched the brass rail, counting to ten, deciding to give them one more chance.
‘During the break,’ she leafed forward to the last movement, ‘I looked out at the Blackmere Woods, and realized how all the different greens contribute to the beauty of the spring, merging together like a great orchestra.’
Cynical, bored, impatient, menacing, the RSO spread out below her.
‘I like to think of you, Eldred and Hilary, and your clarinets providing the acid yellow of the poplars, right, and the trombones,’ Abby smiled at Dixie, ‘like the stinging saffron of the great oaks, and the flutes, the lovely eerie silver of the whitebeams. Barry’s basses splendid dark evergreens, and of course the horns, Viking and Blue and co., soaring like beech trees topped with radiant dancing pale green.’
‘I don’t want Nugent lifting his leg on me,’ grumbled Viking.
But Abby was in her stride. Looking round at the rapt faces, she thought: I’ve got them at last.
‘I could find trees to illustrate the wonder of the trumpets and the bassoons,’ she smiled forgivingly at Steve Smithson, the union rep, ‘but all I want to say is that like the spring the sound of your individual instruments can blend together to create the beauty of Sibelius—’
But, as she paused to wipe away a tear, Dixie Douglas let out a long and hellish fart.
Immediately Hilary leapt to her feet, flapping her score in horror.
‘Lionel, do something.’
And Abby flipped. She was screaming so hysterically at Dixie, that she didn’t hear the door opening at the back of the hall, or notice the laughter freezing on the faces of the players.
Hearing voices, however, she swung round.
‘Get out, get OUT, how many times have I told you, visitors are not allowed in the hall during rehearsals.’
‘Unless they wear gas masks,’ said Viking.
But the visitors came on. Abby swung round again, with the words: ‘Didn’t you fucking hear me?’ dying on her lips. For it was the chairman, a smirking Miles and a handsome, belligerent stranger.
‘Sorry to interrupt you, Abby,’ said Lord Leatherhead heartily, ‘but I just wanted to introduce you all to your new – er – chief executive, George Hungerford.’
All the orchestra clapped in delight.
Surreptitiously, from behind the bulk of Fat Isobel, Candy got out a huge red brush, powdered her nose, then handed the brush to Clare.
George Hungerford had a square jaw, a broken nose, a mouth set like a trap and tired, hard, turned down eyes behind horn-rimmed spectacles. He looked as tough as a limestone cliff and about as unscalable. He had thick hair, which was cropped very close to his head and the colour and strokeable texture of a bullrush. His dark grey suit was well cut to set off flat, broad shoulders, but also to disguise a spreading midriff.
‘He looks like a bouncer,’ murmured Randy Hamilton.
‘And we all know who we want him to chuck out,’ murmured back Dixie.
George then mounted the stage and told the orchestra in a broad Yorkshire accent, how much he was looking forward to working with them. As he talked, his eyes moved solemnly over each player as though he was memorizing their faces for some future conjuring trick.
He didn’t envisage any great problems, he said.
‘Running an orchestra’s like running any other business. If it doesn’t make a profit, you make changes. I’d like to look at what you’re all up to before I make any decisions.’ Then he added without a flicker of a smile, ‘And I hope you all play a bloody sight better this evening.’
‘Why the hell’s George Hungerford interested in us?’ Viking asked Blue. ‘His usual form is bribing planning officers and knee-capping little old sitting-tenants.’
‘I’d lie down in front of his bulldozer any day,’ sighed Candy.
‘Looks ruthless,’ said Hilary, with a sniff.
‘He is, too,’ giggled Clare, the orchestra Sloane. ‘His wife was called Ruth. They split up last year. I read all about it in the News of the World. Ruth ran off with one of his even richer rivals. She’s very beautiful in a Weybridge, skirt-on-the-knee, matching accessory way. Those classical types always screw like stoats beneath the Elizabeth Arden exterior.’
‘You should know,’ said Hilary bitchily.
Abby slunk back to the Old Bell, mortified that George’s first impression should have been of a sweaty, shaggy, screaming virago. Tonight she would wow him.
As if in anticipation, two cardboard boxes of ge-owns were awaiting her from Parker’s; horrors in mauve, lime-green, jaundice-yellow and the most shocking pink, encrusted with rhinestones, sequins and diamanté, over-busy with cowled necklines, floating panels and kick pleats.
Accompanying them was a handwritten, bullying note, urging Abby to make George’s first night special with an evening gown fitting the occasion in every sense. Mrs Parker had somehow got hold of Abby’s measurements.
Incensed at being dictated to, Abby didn’t even try them on, merely washing her hair and dressing in the flowing indigo trouser suit she’d worn at her début concert.
She wished she had a friend in the orchestra with whom to discuss George. He had seemed so forceful because he’d made no attempt to ingratiate himself. He had certainly electrified the women in the orchestra. Parker’s sold out of scented body lotion by closing time, and scuffles broke out in the changing room, as the prettiest girls fought for a glimpse in the communal mirror as they applied blusher and knotted coloured ribbons in their hair.
Hilary was livid, on George’s first night, that Eldred and not she was playing the clarinet solo in the Mother Goose Suite.
‘That dress is much too low, Nellie,’ she snapped. ‘You know we can’t show bare arms or cleavages.’
‘Some of us haven’t got cleavages to show,’ said Nellie, rudely as she sprayed Anais Anais behind her knees. ‘George Hungerford won’t know I haven’t got plunging permission.’
‘With all the different floral scents wafting from the orchestra,’ giggled Candy to Clare, ‘Abby’s going to get her image of a spring meadow, if not a wood.’
Abby was desperate for everything to go well, but, alas, the concert was a disaster. Some joker had slotted a page from Dixie’s porn mag into the middle of her Mother Goose score. Scrumpling it up in a rage, she chucked it over her shoulder, where it landed in the massive, corsetted lap of Mrs Parker, who was already spitting because no ge-own had been worn.
The hall was half-empty and the pouring rain, which had discouraged random ticket buyers, dripped through the roof on Abby’s head, but failed to extinguish the fire in a local bakery, so the first movement of Sibelius was ruined by clanging fire-engines. Worst of all, one of Miss Priddock’s programme sellers, over-excited by the arrival of George Hungerford, charged back and forth to the Ladies throughout, and when a chain wouldn’t pull, started furiously clanking in syncopation to the heroic swinging tune in the horns, reducing the RSO to more fits of laughter.
‘Delhi Belly Variations,’ murmured Viking to Blue as he emptied water out of his horn.
But at last they reached the six wonderfully dramatic hammer blows, which test any conductor, because an audience can often assume the whole thing’s finished and start clapping too early.
Abby’s pauses were the longest and most dramatic ever heard in the H.P. Hall, but during the penultimate silence, the chain in the Ladies clanked again. Dixie Douglas promptly corpsed and came in a beat too soon. Forgetting herself, an incensed Abby raised two very public fingers at him and, running off the platform, locked herself in the conductor’s room, refusing to acknowledge any of the applause. She needed a showdown with George so she could pour out her grievances, but when she finally unlocked the door the place was deserted, and the caretaker was locking up.
Escaping through a side-door, Abby found the rain had stopped, and breathed in a lovely smell of wet earth and the lilies of the valley which Old Cyril had planted under Miss Priddock’s window.
‘Fort we’d never escape wivout injury,’ he patted the Rolls’ bonnet, ‘but it was empty in five minutes. Vroom, vroom, vroom. No-one ‘it us. Never seen driving like it.’
‘Glad they do something well.’
‘It was a grite concert. Don’t know how you remember all them notes.’
‘Thanks,’ said Abby. ‘Where’s your boss?’
The chauffeur nodded up to the chairman’s office, where George Hungerford, puffing at a cigar, blotted out light from the window, as he paced back and forth, talking and talking.
Probably about me, thought Abby wearily.
As she entered her hotel, a yawning receptionist handed her a big bunch of wild garlic.
‘A child has just delivered this.’
Imagining some kind of voodoo, Abby was about to chuck the starry white flowers into the street, when she found a note, which she ripped open with trembling hands. She read:
Dear Miss Rosen,
Sorry I upset you,
love
Cherub Wilson.
It was the first kindness anyone had shown her in weeks. Abby started to cry helplessly. She must get a grip on herself.
Her honeymoon with the Rutshire Butcher it seemed was also over. His review of the concert was headlined: FLUSHED WITH SUCCESS – ‘The lavatory chain,’ he wrote, ‘was the only thing that played at the correct tempo in Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony.’
TWENTY-EIGHT
Fortunately George Hungerford disappeared in his helicopter the following morning, no doubt looking for properties to develop. He also had several acres in central Manchester to think about. After a slight blip in the recession, the developer’s cranes were flying again.