A Song Begins (Warrender Saga Book 1)

by Mary Burchell

  The words were not going to win her any prizes, or compensate for the lost thousand pounds. But Anthea felt indescribably grateful for them, and the glow of them carried her through the sad necessity of telling Roland she had lost.

  During the next few days, even Anthea’s resilience failed her. She resolutely put her dreams behind her and took herself along to the only employment agency in Cromerdale, with the determination to find herself some sort of employment.

  The result was not encouraging, for she had little to offer except a reasonably good general education, excellent health and a pleasing appearance.

  “You mean no typing and no shorthand?” said the young woman behind the enquiry desk, as though Anthea had come in without the decent minimum of clothes on.

  “I’m afraid not,” admitted Anthea, feeling not quite nice to know.

  “Well, I’ll put you down, of course.” The young woman spoke as though it would really be a waste of time. “And let you know if — well, we’ll see – ”

  The words died away into a non-committal murmur, and Anthea went out into the street again. As she did so, a voice hailed her from the other side of the street, and Miss Sharon — usually the most cautious and distrustful of pedestrians — plunged straight into the mainstream of Cromer-dale’s morning traffic.

  Someone honked a horn and someone else swore, and a woman near Anthea said, “There! did you ever? Some of the old ones are the worst.” And then Miss Sharon was standing safely beside Anthea, trembling slightly, but whether from her adventure or because of some inner emotion as yet unexplained, Anthea was not sure.

  “Miss Sharon, whatever made you do such a thing?” Anthea took her affectionately by the arm.

  “I don’t know,” was the somewhat shaky reply. “At least, yes, I do. I had to speak to you, and I was afraid of missing you. You weren’t at home when I called.”

  “But what’s happened?” Intrigued and puzzled, Anthea stared at her teacher, who was evidently labouring under a high degree of excitement.

  “Come home,” said Miss Sharon. “Come home with me now, and I’ll tell you. It may help me to believe it myself.” And after that she would not say a word, in spite of Anthea’s wildly curious enquiries, until they arrived at the small house near the bridge where she lived.

  “Come into the music room.” Miss Sharon took off her hat and tossed it on to a peg in the hall, with an air of abandon that made Anthea open her eyes wide. But she followed her teacher into the room at the back of the house. The room where she had first been told that she had it in her to be a real singer. The room where she had striven so hard to make “With Verdure Clad” a performance that would sweep her to success in the competition.

  “Sit down,” said Miss Sharon, and Anthea sat down. “Now read that.” And, in the manner of one producing a whole family of rabbits from a hat, Miss Sharon handed Anthea a typewritten letter.

  Mystified, Anthea took it and looked at the address — Killigrew Mansions, London, W.l — which conveyed nothing to her at all. Then she read on:

  “Dear Madam, — I have been asked to get in touch with you as the teacher of Miss Anthea Benton, one of the competitors in the Cromerdale Television Contest last Thursday. Someone who heard her on that occasion was sufficiently impressed to want to further her training, and I have been asked to undertake what I might call the overall direction of this. I shall be obliged, therefore, if you will acquaint Miss Benton with the contents of this letter, and arrange for her to come to London next Tuesday (the 20th) when I will audition her at the above address at 3 p.m., and decide what her future course of instruction should be.

  Yours sincerely,

  Oscar Warrender.”

  “I don’t — believe it!” whispered Anthea, divided between horror and rapture. “I don’t believe it!”

  “I couldn’t either,” said Miss Sharon. “I cried when I first read the letter.”

  “Oh, Miss Sharon, did you?” This information was almost as shattering as the letter, for Anthea simply could not imagine her strict and self-contained teacher shedding tears.

  “Of course,” was the reply. “What else could I do? It’s the sort of thing one dreams of — asks God on one’s knees for — but never expects to have really happen. That you — that a pupil of mine — should be considered worthy to have her studies directed by Oscar Warrender!”

  “That's not the best part of it!” declared Anthea disgustedly. “In fact, it’s the only fly in the ointment. I can hardly bear the thought of being under the authority of that odious man, but — ”

  “He is a genius,” stated Miss Sharon coldly. “And they’re not so common, Anthea. Be thankful that he even knows that you exist.”

  “I don’t think he wants to know it,” muttered Anthea a trifle sulkily. “I can’t imagine how he was persuaded to take this on. But someone — but who? — must have talked him over, or agreed to pay him handsomely or something. I can’t imagine who would care enough — either about me personally or about my possibilities as a singer,” she added honestly.

  “I wondered,” said Miss Sharon — rather naively, Anthea thought — “if perhaps it were really he himself. That he secretly thought you very fine and decided to take you in hand, but wanted to remain anonymous.”

  “Oh, dear Miss Sharon!” Anthea laughed at this flight of fancy. “He wouldn’t think of anything like that in a hundred years. No one could be less given to romantic impulses, I feel sure. And I just wish you could have seen the way he brushed me off, anyway. At least, no, I don’t, for I’m still smarting at the humiliation of it. He practically said I was a lump – ”

  “A lump?” Miss Sharon was scandalised that even a genius should so far forget himself.

  “Well, he said I was just good raw material,” amended Anthea, “and that I had no temperament. And he took quite a lot of trouble — I could see he did — to influence the others against me. But it doesn’t matter now. Someone thought differently. Someone” — she stopped suddenly and flushed and then went pale. “Oh,” she said almost fearfully, “I think — perhaps — I know — who it is.”

  “Then keep the thought to yourself,” said Miss Sharon, with heroic self-control and integrity. “Whoever is doing this for you has gone to some trouble to remain anonymous. The least you can do is respect his or her wishes.”

  “His,” murmured Anthea softly. “His, I feel sure.”

  And, with a wave of gratitude that brought the tears to her eyes, she recalled what Neil Prentiss had said to her about its being impossible to “keep a lovely, gifted girl down”.

  CHAPTER II

  It was Neil Prentiss, of course. It had to be! And suddenly she wanted it to be Neil with an intensity she could not quite explain to herself.

  Perhaps, after his previous generosity to the family, this was almost too much to accept. But he had understood so well about her crushing disappointment. He had felt the full injustice of it himself. And then he had told her so warmly how he genuinely admired her gifts and how, although he was no singer himself, he was passionately interested in singing as an art. It all added up to one thing only. It was to Neil Prentiss that she owed this glorious, this undreamed-of chance.

  The only part of the arrangement which did surprise her was that he should have given Oscar Warrender authority over her. He knew — none better! — how she felt about the conductor, and he must know that she would be a good deal dismayed by the thought of actually working with him.

  On the other hand, she had seen for herself that to Neil Prentiss that cold, authoritative man had a knowledge and judgment second to none. He must have felt — and rightly so, she had to admit — that this consideration must override any personal prejudice or antipathy.

  For an hour or more Anthea and Miss Sharon continued to discuss the unbelievable event. And, as each aspect came under her dazzled attention, Anthea realised more and more that the short, unemotional, typewritten letter had altered her whole life.

  “I hope he won’t sim
ply hear me and then say I’m not worthy of his attention,” she said nervously.

  But Miss Sharon pointed out that he had apparently already made some sort of agreement. Therefore for some probationary period at least, she would be given a chance to prove herself.

  “And I will,” thought Anthea. “I will. I’ll make him eat his few contemptuous, condescending words about me one day!”

  At home once more, she had to explain at some length before her mother could understand or believe what had happened. The more so that it was only then that she heard about the abortive attempt to win the television contest.

  “You poor child, how did you keep it to yourself?” she cried. “Such a bitter disappointment.”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” Anthea said, smiling. And that was true. No disappointment, no slight, no injustice mattered now. Thanks to Neil Prentiss, she was to have a second golden chance.

  Even to her mother she said nothing about her secret belief, and enjoyable speculation about her possible benefactor was the chief topic of conversation in the Benton household during the next few days.

  Miss Sharon wrote to confirm the appointment, and she even generously declared herself willing to pay Anthea’s fare to London. But this proved unnecessary, as by return of post there came a second-class return ticket (no silly unnecessary extravagances, Anthea was almost relieved to see) and a five-pound note, to which there was attached a typed slip saying, “For meals, taxi-fares and sundries”.

  “He thinks of everything, the darling!” thought Anthea. And she was not referring to Oscar Warrender.

  Tuesday was a beautiful, sunny, hopeful sort of day, and as she sat in the train Anthea thought that few people could have known such depths of despair and such heights of joyous excitement in the space of a couple of weeks.

  It was two o’clock when she arrived at the big London terminus. But she had lunched on the train, and she took a taxi immediately to Killigrew Mansions. Then, having ascertained exactly where she had to go, she went into St. James’s Park, where she sat in the sunshine, suddenly strangely short of breath, and tried to still the uneven beating of her heart, now that the test was so near.

  She wished now, quite fervently, that the great conductor had not heard her candid opinion of him, in the rain, outside Cromerdale Town Hall. At the time, it had seemed a wonderful gesture of bravado. But now — alone in London, a very long way from home, and about to beard the great man in his own home — she felt it had been one of her less happy impulses.

  The sound of Big Ben striking a quarter to three drifted across the Park and, gathering the remnants of her courage around her, Anthea walked back to Killigrew Mansions and took the lift to No. 14 which seemed to occupy, she noticed, most of the top floor. Here, a pleasant-faced woman — housekeeper rather than family, she thought — admitted her to a large and handsome apartment.

  “Come through to the studio. Mr. Warrender won’t keep you a minute,” the woman said. And she took Anthea down two or three steps into a beautiful, lofty room, which had windows along one side, giving a splendid view across the Park to the Foreign Office.

  There was no one in the room. But, as Anthea stood there, nervously taking off her gloves, the conductor came in by a side door. He greeted her quite courteously, and told her to take off her hat and sit down. Nothing in his expression indicated that he recalled the circumstances of their last meeting, but she could not really believe that he did not remember every detail of it.

  “Tell me about your experience so far,” he commanded. And when she gave him the length of time she had been studying, he made a disparaging little grimace and muttered, “Practically a beginner.”

  “I know it isn’t very long,” Anthea said defensively. “But Miss Sharon — my teacher — tells me that I have at least the advantage of an even scale and a — a natural placement.”

  “You don’t say,” he replied, with dangerous politeness, and she wished she had kept that bit to herself. “Well, come along and let’s hear you.”

  He spoke as though he had never heard her before, and she actually wondered for a moment if he had forgotten!

  But then, as he sat at the piano, taking her through subtly graded exercises and gradually extending scales, she was convinced again that he had forgotten nothing which had happened on that wet Thursday in Cromerdale.

  Finally, he said, “I should like to hear you sing a song or an aria. What do you do in that line?”

  She thought rebelliously of Miss Sharon saying that a Puccini aria was not the right thing for a young beginner to put before the public. But then he was not the public. He was the man who had said she was just raw material, with no temperament. And, a trifle defiantly, she said,

  “I’ll sing Mimi’s aria from the first act of Boheme, if I may.”

  “You may.” For some reason or other, he smiled at that, and she could not help seeing what an extraordinarily attractive smile it was. It did not actually warm those cold, uncomfortably penetrating grey eyes, but it lifted the corners of his arrogant mouth and softened it slightly.

  He gave her the opening phrases of the recitative on the piano, and she began. She thought all the time of what he had said about no temperament, and she poured every ounce of feeling she had into her voice, giving the full power and purity of her really remarkable organ.

  Halfway through he stopped her, made a pencil marking on the score and asked, “To whom are you singing this air?”

  “Why, to — to you,” she said, somewhat taken aback.

  “No, no!” He sounded impatient. “You’re on a stage. It’s the first act. You made your entry just a few minutes ago. To whom are you singing?”

  She was confused and a little frightened by his tone, which seemed to suggest that she was semi-idiotic.

  “To — to the audience, I suppose.”

  “My God!” He passed both his hands over his smooth fair hair and observed to no one in particular, “And she thinks she’s going to be an artist!”

  Anthea bit her lip, and thrust back an unfamiliar desire to weep.

  “To — to Rodolfo,” she stammered. “To the tenor. I didn’t quite understand what you meant.”

  “So I gather. Have you ever read this libretto right through?”

  “Y-yes.”

  “Well, as you discovered at the third guess, you’re singing this to Rodolfo. It’s almost a conversation piece with a young man who has just begun to stir your romantic interest. You’re a sick girl, innocently flirtatious, not asking very much of life, even a little unsure of yourself. Do you understand that?”

  “Y-yes.”

  “Then why, in heaven’s name, did you think it necessary to bellow your pretty confidences at the wretched young man in full voice?”

  She didn’t know. She only knew that she had wanted him to realise that she had some temperament, and a voice whose full beauty and power he had not perhaps suspected when he heard it before. She wished she could have explained. But she could only stand there, with her head bent and her lips trembling slightly.

  ‘Try it again.”

  “G-give me a minute.” She swallowed hard.

  “What do you mean — give you a minute?” She was silent, and suddenly he looked up and said, with irritation, “Oh, for heaven’s sake! If you’re going to work with me, you must learn not to cry as easily as that. Tears bore me and make me nervous.”

  She could not really imagine that anything made him nervous. But she muttered, “I’m sorry.”

  Then he got up and came over to her and, to her inexpressible surprise, took both her hands in his.

  “Stop being a little fool,” he said, not unkindly. “Tears and singing don’t go together. Come here beside me at the piano.” And, still keeping one of her hands, he made her come back to the piano with him. He even continued to hold her hand in a firm, light clasp while he sketchily played through the air on the piano with the other hand. He spoke the words of the aria, as he did so, making her see exactly where subtle empha
sis and darker or lighter shading of the tone could convey meaning and emotion without once overdoing the effect.

  “She’s a little gay, a little sad,” he explained. “Nothing will ever be really solid or secure for her, and she knows it in her heart. But it’s not great tragedy. Just tenderness and pathos. Now go back and try again. And look at me while you’re singing.”

  She went back to stand in the curve of the grand piano, her eyes fixed upon him, her mind struggling to retain everything he had told her. And, for the first time in her life, Anthea seemed to empty herself of her own identity, so that something else slipped in and took its place — the identity of the girl he had described.

  It was not possible to hold it all the time, and once she looked away from that clever, vivid face with the compelling grey eyes. But he said, quietly and authoritatively, “Look at me!” And she looked back and, in some inexplicable way, the spell was upon her again.

  At the end, he did not tell her if she had done well or badly. He simply said, “How soon can you get yourself settled in London and start serious study?”

  “You — you mean,” stammered Anthea, “that you’re going to take me?”

  “Of course.” He looked surprised. “You don’t suppose I should waste this time on you if I didn’t intend to train you, did you?” He spoke a little as though she were a performing dog, she noticed. “It was only a question of how far back we had to start.”

  “I can get settled in London just as soon as you say,” she exclaimed eagerly, almost afraid that this wonderful, incredible chance might be snatched from her even now if she delayed in any way. “It’s for you to say.”

  He seemed to think so too, for he did not accord this declaration of obedience even so much as a passing smile of indulgence. Instead, he began to make rapid suggestions and propositions. And, after no more than half an hour of arranging and telephoning, the thing was done, and Anthea received instructions to be in London on the following Monday, and to report once more at his flat at the same time in the afternoon.