by Jilly Cooper
She jumped at a banging on the door.
‘We’re waiting,’ called Crystelle.
‘Just a sec,’ shouted Abby, turning on the shower.
At home having checked her sleeping children and paid the babysitter out of her pathetic housekeeping allowance, Cathie Jones climbed wearily upstairs. She was too tired to eat.
Gazing out of her bedroom at the stars she started to cry, then not wanting to wake the children, fished in her skirt pocket for a tissue and found a piece of paper on which someone had scrawled the words: ‘Darling Cathie, Thou art fairer than the evening air, clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.’
Five minutes later, Abby stalked out into the garden and as usual everyone fell silent. She had changed back into her red vest and bicycle shorts. Her hair was slicked back and still dripping, her make-up totally washed off. There was a long, long pause.
‘What the fuck,’ snarled George.
Huge, menacing, he bore down on her.
‘Get bluddy oopstairs and back into that dress.’
Abby had never seen anyone angrier, except perhaps Mrs Parker.
‘What’s happened to your beautiful ge-own,’ she screeched.
‘I left it and the shoes on your bed.’
‘And what about those rubies.’
‘They’re on your dressing-table,’ said Abby, then waving an ironic hand at the RSO who were now filling their faces with Dover sole and lobster. ‘Why should I need rubies, when my orchestra are my jewels.’
THIRTY-THREE
The month of August was traditionally a holiday for the RSO. All in all, Abby got a rotten end-of-term report. An enraged Mrs Parker was threatening to withdraw her promised one hundred thousand pounds, and in cahoots with Miles and a horrified Canon Airlie, who had both heard Abby shouting at Lindy Cardew, were agitating for her dismissal. George fired off a written warning about consistently subversive behaviour, pointing out that Abby had only seven months left on her contract. Abby promptly tore up his letter. She should have spent August relaxing and, in the light of her disastrous conducting career, seriously attempting to play the violin again. The physio and the London specialist both said there was nothing more they could do. The block was in Abby’s head. But Abby couldn’t bring herself to try, terrified her genius had deserted her, and after her Strad, any violin would be a let-down.
She had hoped to spend August in Lucerne, enjoying Gisela’s cooking and having her feathers unruffled by Rodney. He appeared to have made an excellent recovery from his heart attack and was now teaching himself the cello, playing with great vigour and a lot of wrong notes.
In Lucerne, as in England, the heatwave showed no signs of abating and had already singed the woods around the lake, whose level had dropped more than a foot. Two days after her arrival, Abby stretched out in an orange bikini, lake water drying on her darkening gold body.
Despite the heat she and Rodney had just polished off the palest green avocado mousse and an exquisite fish salad, which Gisela had made for lunch, plus a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé. Abby was now misery-eating her way through a bowl of figs, her big white teeth tearing at the scarlet flesh. From the nearby shadow of a blue striped umbrella, Rodney sat drinking Armagnac, puffing at a large cigar, and listening as he had done since she arrived. He was very distressed to see her so unhappy.
‘Which of my naughty boys is causing you the most bother?’
‘They all hate me,’ moaned Abby. ‘Dixie, Randy, that vile Carmine, Quinton, El Creepo (beneath his smarmy manner), Davie Buckle, Lionel, Viking most of all.’
‘Are you apologizing enough, darling? If you start with the wrong beat, if you show three instead of four, you must say, “It’s my fault”.’
‘That’s weakness,’ stormed Abby. ‘Basically they hate taking orders from a woman, right. And we’ve got such terrific stuff coming up. I told you about Fanny Mendelssohn and Winifred Trapp.’
‘You don’t want too much of that.’ Rodney tipped his ash on the parched yellow grass.
‘Celebrating women in the Arts?’ demanded Abby.
‘Lot better places to celebrate them.’ Then, seeing the outrage on Abby’s face, added hurriedly, ‘You know I adore your sex, but I don’t feel they’re at their best composing music.’
‘That’s because you’ve never bothered to listen to them. Christ it’s hot.’ Angrily, Abby peeled off her bikini top. ‘And I bet they’d have delivered on time, if any one had really appreciated their music, not like Boris Levitsky. We’re recording Rachel’s Requiem next season and not a squeak out of Boris, and I gotta learn the wretched thing. Wasn’t Viking a friend of Boris’s?’
Always she returns to Viking, thought Rodney, feeling his cock stir as he glanced at the beautiful breasts only slightly less golden than the rest of her body.
‘Not really a friend,’ he said ‘Viking’s spoilt – he and Boris were in spiky competition over who could pull the best girls. Lionel’s your main problem. One can’t operate if the leader’s against one – I’m afraid he’ll always be a thorn in your deliciously firm young flesh, darling.’
‘Not so young any more,’ grumbled Abby. ‘I’ll be twenty-nine in October.’
‘And I’m going to be seventy-nine in October, don’t be a silly-billy.’
Abby sat up swinging her legs sideways. ‘I wish all men were like you.’
‘I’m not that different from the rest of them.’ Stretching out a warm hand as though he was testing a peach, Rodney gently fingered her breast.
Abby gasped, amazed at the sudden quivering warmth between her legs.
‘I-I see you as the grandfather I never really had,’ she stammered.
‘Really?’ Rodney raised a mocking eyebrow, as his thumb caressed a rapidly hardening nipple.
‘Where’s Gisela?’ whispered Abby.
‘Making crab-apple jelly. Artists are oblivious when they are in the process of creation.’
Abby shut her eyes as the languid practised caress continued.
‘You’re the one turning me to jelly; d’you really want me, Rodney?’
‘My child, a slow burn doesn’t mean the flame isn’t poised to singe the ceiling.’
‘Oh Christ,’ exploded Abby as, unwelcome as the bones singing in Ezekiel, the white cordless telephone rang.
It was Flora.
‘You’re not the only one in the doghouse, Abby, Hitler Hungerford says he’ll tear up Boris’s contract if he doesn’t deliver on 1 September, and he wants Boris to pay back the two-thousand-pound advance. Boris is in hysterics, he hasn’t got two pence, let alone two grand. I’ve asked him to stay. I hope you don’t mind. Perhaps Marcus and I can prod him into action and at least copy the stuff out for him.’
Abby looked down at Rodney’s hand, wrinkled, covered in liverspots, yet making it almost impossible for her to think rationally: ‘Boris can sleep in the attic bedroom.’ She glanced sideways at Rodney’s watch. ‘I’ll try and get the four o’clock plane.’
Rodney sighed as she switched off the telephone.
‘Probably just as well, darling. Tell Boris to give Lionel a long, flashy but not too difficult solo to keep him quiet. Haydn said you could do anything with musicians if you gave them the chance to show off.’
He was sad to see Abby go, but quite relieved. He wanted to learn the cello part of Don Quixote and he didn’t think he could have coped with a month of such obsessive introspection.
No-one could have been more obsessively introspective than Boris. Abby reached home before he did, and was pleased to see her little faded red-brick cottage peering out of the yellowing woods, the fox cub now seeking refuge from the hunting season.
‘You don’t think Boris has topped himself,’ said a worried Flora. ‘We expressed him some cash for his train fare and a taxi.’
Boris arrived with the first stars, having drunk his taxi fare on the train and drenched himself, falling into the lake, on his stumbling walk from the station. His only luggage was a bulging Waitrose carrier bag
, of which Flora speedily relieved him.
‘Have you brought us some goodies?’
‘I vish.’
Inside, frantically scrawled on a mass of manuscript paper were the endless abandoned beginnings of Rachel’s Requiem.
‘I cannot write. I cannot pay back the RSO, I cannot pay Astrid, my lovely au pair, so she has taken the cheeldren to Rachel’s parents, who think me murderer anyway, for one month to geeve me peace to write.’
His upended dark curls were streaked with grey, his eyes were black caverns. He was shaking uncontrollably.
But after a very hot bath, and a change into Marcus’s sweatshirt and jeans, which now fitted his formerly stocky body, Boris had cheered up enough to tuck into a large steak, French beans and mashed potato, cooked by Marcus, and was soon pouring out his troubles and a great deal of red wine.
‘Schumann say: Requiem is a thing one writes for oneself! I shall not leeve long,’ Boris coated a piece of steak with mustard, ‘I am like Mozart, someone vill have to finish vork for me.’
Flora, who had Scriabin on her knee, removing goose-grass burrs out of his plumy white tail, picked up a spoon and helped herself to some French beans.
‘Who could finish it for you?’ she asked innocently.
‘Edith Spink or perhaps Sonny Parker,’ suggested Marcus equally innocently.
‘Never,’ Boris crashed his hand down on the kitchen table, spilling his half-pint of red wine. ‘Ovair my dead buddy.’
‘It’s going to be dead anyway,’ giggled Flora. ‘You’ll be twanging a harp on a cloud beside Rachel.’
‘Flora,’ reproved Marcus, mopping up the wine with a piece of kitchen roll. Scriabin’s proximity was making his eyes water.
‘I listened to John Tavener at the proms last night,’ Flora ignored Boris’s scowl. ‘It hardly left the note of D. You can be less boring than that.’
‘How far have you got?’ asked Abby.
‘I sketch most of it in the head, but I am so tired vorking sixteen hours a day.’ Then, as Flora played an imaginary violin, moaned, ‘I am so disappointed and frustrated at non-performance of my vork.’
‘How can they perform it, when you don’t write anything but rude postcards to Edith Spink?’ said Flora, returning to the French beans.
‘Are you still not having singers?’ asked Marcus, trying to lead the conversation into less thorny paths.
Boris nodded his shaggy head.
‘Britten write requiem to his parents wizout singers. I ’ate singers.’
‘I hate musicians,’ sighed Abby. ‘You’ve licked that spoon Flora. Why don’t we dispense with them as well.’
‘Then we could have sixty minutes of silence,’ said Flora, ‘jolly peaceful and much cheaper.’
‘The Arts Council would find it very meaningful,’ added Marcus.
‘You all joke,’ grumbled Boris, scooping up the rest of the mashed potato and adding an ounce of butter. ‘None of you realize, not Lear, nor Oepidus nor ’Amlet suffer like I do. I’m so vorried I’m written out.’
‘Course you’re not,’ said Flora, ‘you’ll feel better after a good night’s sleep, and no bottles of red under the bed. We’ll all help you.’
‘Tomorrow I go on vagon,’ said Boris, refilling his glass.
Because Marcus stayed at home to practise and give piano lessons while Flora and Abby left the cottage to work, it was assumed that he had the time to shop, cook, unload the dish-washer, transfer dripping underwear from washing-machine to dryer, feed the cats, change duvets, let in plumbers and electricians and often pay for them, too.
Predictably the lion’s share of helping Boris fell to him. Thus the following morning, it was Flora who read out the nine sections of the Mass, so Marcus could copy them down and Boris could later tick off each section as he finished it.
‘“Dies Irae”,’ read Flora, who was wandering round the kitchen with Scriabin, a purring black-and-white ruff round her neck.
‘That’s a joke for a start. Rachel was such a crosspatch she gave Boris months and years of “Irae”, always making him smoke outside and not putting salt in anything except wounds.’
‘Next,’ Marcus looked up.
‘“Rex Tremendae”, what a terrific name for a dog.’
‘Got that.’
‘“Agnus Dei”,’ Flora giggled. ‘Sounds like Doris Day’s sister. Doris was seriously kind to dogs and filled her house and the annexe with strays – I wish we could have a dog.’
‘Well, you can’t.’ Clad only in her bikini, Brahms’ Second Symphony under her arm, Abby was on her way out to the garden.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked crossly, as she went through the living-room and found Boris sitting on one of her pale beige Habitat sofas, with manuscript paper, several pencils and erasers on an uncomfortably low table in front of him.
‘I’m thinking what to put,’ said Boris sulkily. ‘It’s August and the birds are mute from feeding their young as I am. Zee muse as desert me.’
‘We are not a muse,’ murmured Flora to Marcus.
‘Rodney suggested you wrote a long easy solo for Lionel to keep him quiet,’ suggested Abby.
‘I ’ate Lionel, little vanker, I will make eet impossibly deeficult.’
Cheered at the prospect of Lionel on the rack, Boris started to scribble down notes, but, having been bawled out by Abby for spilling a sneaked glass of red wine over her new yellow rush-matting, he retreated sulkily to Marcus’s studio.
Here he worked feverishly, sometimes stopping to discuss ideas with Marcus, working out details on the piano together, singing phrases which Marcus, who had absolute pitch, could take down like shorthand.
But Marcus’s main task was emptying waste-paper baskets of scrumpled-up paper. The progress was desperately slow. Boris spent a lot of time ringing Astrid, ostensibly to check on the children.
‘Such a good father,’ sighed Abby.
A week later, Boris had struggled to the end of the ‘Dies Irae’ and ‘Rex Tremendae’, and Flora and Marcus were copying them out in the garden, helped by the kittens who kept jumping on top of the manuscript paper and shooting their black pens all over the place.
‘Probably improving it,’ muttered Flora. ‘Talk about Slav labour. And how many times do I have to tell you not to clean up after Abby – you’re too nice to her.’
They were harvesting in the field beyond the front gate, huge gold blocks rising like ingots out of the platinum-blond grass. But suddenly over the roar of the huge combine, Flora and Marcus heard Boris tapping out a tune on the piano, rising fourths and fifths, tentative but haunting. He was playing it again, changing it slightly, shoving in a few discords, then he played the first version.
Marcus and Flora looked at each other.
‘Oh, please don’t spoil it,’ they said in unison, as Boris introduced an interrupted cadence, and started messing around with the tempo.
‘We must tell him,’ Flora leapt to her feet.
‘He told us not to disturb him.’
‘We should before he buggers it up. Write it down. That is the most glorious, glorious tune,’ cried Flora, pushing open the door of Marcus’s once immaculate studio. ‘Play it again.’
Marcus followed, removing Boris’s wine glass from the top of the Steinway, which was already covered in drink rings, then scribbling down the notes on a piece of manuscript paper. As he finished he said in ecstasy: ‘It’s miraculous, Boris.’
Boris shook his head and, retrieving his glass, filled it up.
‘It’s too good, too little, too nice, too predictable.’
‘You’re crazy, Boris,’ interrupted Abby, who had heard that last version. ‘It’s so beautiful.’
‘Stunning.’ Flora picked up the piece of manuscript paper and sang the tune, lifting the hair on the back of everyone’s necks.
‘That’s it, “Rachel’s Lament”,’ said Marcus, sitting down and playing it on the piano.
Abby fingered the curves of Boris’s violin, never more
longing to join in.
‘Please make it a horn solo for Viking,’ she begged. ‘Viking wouldn’t sentimentalize it.’
Boris looked sulky. ‘It is too sweet for my Rachel.’ And, snatching the page, he tore it into little pieces and stormed off into the wood, not returning until nightfall.
All the same the composition of such a beautiful tune, unleashed something in Boris. The next day, although he grumbled every time the others sang it, he kept working feverishly, sixteen hours on the trot, increasingly encouraged by what he had produced, wading through the rapids, clinging to one stepping-stone after another, until by the last evening of the third week, he had written six out of nine sections.
It was still so hot, they had all the cottage windows open. Abby was upstairs working on the Brahms Second Symphony which the RSO were playing their first week back. Flora was copying out the ‘Agnus Dei’ in the kitchen and also watching a prom production of Götterdammerung on television, fulminating because Brünnhilde had just jumped Siegfried’s horse into the funeral pyre.
‘Bloody bitch, I’ll report her to the RSPCA.’
She had turned down the sound because Marcus, who had a recital in the North of England the next day, was practising Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood. Even on the old sitting-room upright, it sounded exquisite, and Marcus had hardly had any chance recently to play anything except Boris’s stuff.
He’s the most talented of all of us, thought Flora guiltily, and he’s the one who makes all the sacrifices.
Marcus had reached a little piece called ‘By the Fireside’, when Boris burst in, tears streaming down his anguished face.
‘Rachel play that very last time I see her, she, too, have recital next day,’ he sobbed, ‘I pull her off piano-stool in middle and we made love.’
Seizing Flora’s yellow sarong from the floor, he wiped his eyes and blew his nose.
Marcus leapt up in horror.
‘I’ll stop, Boris, I’m dreadfully sorry.’
‘No, no, go on, play it on Steinway, it ees catharsis.’
Marcus was not very happy with his recital. He drove all the way to a small Lancashire mining town. No-one welcomed him except the caretaker. There were thirty people in the audience who clapped him politely. Afterwards a secretary paid him one hundred pounds. The whole trip cost him almost as much in petrol, as he drove on the following day to see his grandmother in Cheshire, who’d been hit by Lloyd’s and her sixth husband, and who never stopped grumbling about the small allowance given to her by Rupert. Marcus stayed a couple of nights trying to cheer her up, but depressing himself, realizing how desperately he missed his father and everyone at Penscombe.