A Song Begins (Warrender Saga Book 1)

by Mary Burchell

  “I hadn’t really thought of it that way,” he said.

  “Then think of it now,” Anthea retorted coldly. And after that there was silence once more in the car.

  When they finally arrived back at the boarding-house, the conductor took a small envelope from his pocket and held it out to Anthea.

  “There’s your ticket for Friday night,” he informed her. “And mind you’re there in good time.”

  She stared at the envelope without touching it, for in that moment she was loth to accept even so much as a free ticket from him.

  “Thank you,” she said disdainfully. “But I’ll go with the others in the amphitheatre.”

  “You’ll do nothing of the sort,” he informed her curtly. “You will sit in the third row of the stalls, where you can appreciate every shade of the performance. It’s the first time you’ve ever heard a great conductor. You may as well be fully aware of what that means.”

  “Isn’t that just a trifle conceited of you?” she enquired drily.

  “No, of course not.” He remained completely unmoved. “It’s an important appraisal of an artist, even though the artist happens to be myself. You will have to learn to do that if you are going to acquire any proper scale of judgment. You’ll find that, unless you are able to assess yourself without either coyness or ruthlessness, you will not progress. Take the ticket and stop arguing. It’s time you were in bed.”

  She took the ticket then. But she did not thank him, nor did she bid him goodnight. Why should she? she thought angrily. He gave her the ticket to please himself rather than her, and she did not wish him a good night, anyway. On the contrary, she hoped he would lie awake and think how badly he had behaved that evening. But she very much doubted if he would.

  In point of fact, it was Anthea who lay awake, trying to think back over the lovely part of the evening with Neil, but perpetually frustrated by the needling recollection of the way Oscar Warrender had brought the delightful expedition to a close.

  “They all say he’s a genius,” she thought bitterly. “But I think his special genius lies in making himself more perfectly odious than anyone else.”

  And finally, rather pleased with this summing up of the situation, she fell asleep.

  The next morning at breakfast, Vicki naturally wanted to know how the evening had gone. So Anthea gave her a glowing account of the play and the supper-party, but without mentioning the intervention of Oscar Warrender.

  Vicki, however, was a great one for detail.

  “What time did your Neil finally bring you home?” she wanted to know. “And has he arranged to see you again while he’s in London?”

  Anthea hesitated. Then, because anger surged up afresh within her, she said rather curtly,

  “Neil didn’t bring me home. Mr. Warrender did.”

  “Do you mean he joined the supper party too?” Vicki’s eyes widened and she looked impressed.

  “Not quite in the sense you mean,” replied Anthea grimly. “He came into the restaurant, saw me there, and took it upon himself to come over and insist on my going home then and there. He lectured me about being out at all at that time of night, saying that a singer’s life was a strict and dedicated one — or some such guff. He behaved atrociously,” she added, and even now her voice shook with passion as she thought of that scene.

  “My dear!” Vicki was enjoyably scandalised. “Didn’t your Neil offer to fight him or something?”

  “No, of course not. One can’t make a scene in public.”

  “Nor with Oscar Warrender,” Vicki added feelingly. “He’s the sort of person who says a thing must be, and it’s more or less done. No arguments or appeal.”

  “There was a certain amount of argument.”

  “But no question of the outcome?”

  For a few seconds Anthea did not reply. Then she said, reluctantly, “No question of the outcome.”

  And suddenly she wished that Neil had absolutely refused to let Oscar Warrender take her home, however undesirable or unreasonable that might have been.

  Perhaps Neil too felt that he should have been somewhat firmer in his handling of the situation. At any rate, he telephoned before she had finished her breakfast, full of concern and apologies.

  “I simply can’t get over his insolence,” he said. “And I can’t tell you how sorry I am, Anthea, that I just could not leave my other guests at that point.”

  “Please don’t worry about it at all.” Anthea was immediately warm and reassuring. “I knew you had no choice in the matter. One can’t possibly leave one’s guest flat. Anyway, when Mr. Warrender is in that mood there’s only one thing to do. Obey him.”

  “I didn’t realise that you had quite such a tough time with him.” Neil sounded really disturbed. “I’m afraid you must curse whatever well-meaning idiot put you under his direction.”

  “Oh, no!” Anthea actually laughed in her eagerness to remove any misgiving he might have on that score. “I give my — my unknown benefactor credit for realising that what I wanted above everything else was perfection of training. And certainly I am having that from Oscar Warrender, impossible and odious though he may be. I know I’m lucky to be under him.”

  “Even though he’s so abominable to you?”

  “Even so,” declared Anthea firmly.

  “Well — I don’t know.” He sounded dissatisfied. “It seems a pretty miserable situation to me.”

  “Oh, no, Neil!” she cried from her heart. “It’s not miserable. Nothing as negative as that. Maddening and infuriating perhaps, but extraordinarily stimulating too. I suppose that’s why one catches fire.”

  “Does one catch fire for him?”

  “Of course.”

  There was quite a long pause. Then Neil Prentiss said curiously, “All the same, do you rather loathe him, Anthea?”

  She opened her lips to say that she did. The words were actually on the tip of her tongue. Then something stronger than her anger held her silent, and suddenly she was confused. Not only in what she should say, but even in what she actually thought. And finally she replied, quite lightly,

  “It’s a purely professional relationship — ” though she knew very well it was not. “Loathing or — or the reverse simply doesn’t come into it. He is the man who can make me a singer and, as such, I accept him.”

  “I see,” said Neil. But he sounded puzzled, and Anthea thought she could understand why. She was a good deal puzzled herself on that particular issue.

  Neil then explained that he would not be free to see her again that day, but that he had a ticket for the opera the following evening, when he would hope to see her, in one of the intervals.

  “And if you can escape from your tyrant,” he added, “perhaps we could have supper together afterwards. I’ll find somewhere off the beaten track, where he couldn’t possibly turn up.”

  But she said, “Thank you very much, Neil — but no.”

  “Still scared?”

  “Not that. Just that I accept his superior knowledge of what a singer should do.”

  “I hope he realises what a good pupil he has!”

  “I doubt it,” Anthea laughed.

  “Did he coax or bully you into that state of mind?” Neil wanted to know.

  “Neither,” said Anthea slowly. “He convinced me by the weight of his natural authority, I suppose.”

  “Well, well — ” Neil sounded half amused, half impatient. “I commend you for your scruples. But I can’t help wishing you were a little less conscientious on this occasion.”

  She laughed at that, but she refused to be moved from her decision. And, having agreed to meet him at the opera the following evening, she rang off.

  Later that day, at her singing lesson, Anthea found Enid Mountjoy in a slightly less formal mood than usual, and impulsively she asked her,

  “Miss Mountjoy, does Mr. Warrender always behave like a tyrant to his pupils?”

  There was a short pause. Then Enid Mountjoy said,

  “I don’t recal
l his ever having had another pupil, Anthea, so I don’t know.”

  “N-not ever? Do you mean” — Anthea was astonished, thrilled and rather frightened all at once — “that I’m the only one he has ever deigned to take in hand?”

  “So far as I know.” Her teacher rearranged some scores somewhat unnecessarily on the piano. “It’s quite unusual for anyone of his eminence to bother with pupils, you know.”

  “Then someone — my unknown patron, or whatever I must call him — must be paying him very handsomely to do this,” Anthea exclaimed.

  “Possibly.” For a moment the older woman seemed inclined to leave it at that. Then she added, a little as though she could not help it, “But I doubt if money enters into it much. Oscar Warrender doesn’t strike me as exactly hard-up.”

  “N — no,” agreed Anthea, thinking of the flat at Killigrew Mansions. “But then why else, Miss Mountjoy? why else?” Enid Mountjoy laughed at that.

  “Anthea, you’re strangely modest for an artist,” she remarked amusedly. “Most students would have put forward their own qualities as the explanation long before this.”

  “You mean” — Anthea looked at her rather shyly — “that he must, somehow, think me good enough to warrant his spending time on me?”

  “I think he must, my dear.”

  “He doesn’t give that impression,” said Anthea, intrigued but doubtful.

  “I’m afraid he is probably a pretty hard taskmaster,” the other woman admitted. “But one day you will be glad of that, Anthea. This is almost the hardest life there is, if one does it properly, and perhaps someone has to be hard with us in the very beginning. Kind words and easy applause can come later. Not at the beginning.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Anthea sighed. “But he’s pretty beastly sometimes for no reason at all.”

  “Possibly. All great artists live on their nerves, and seldom suffer fools gladly,” replied Enid Mountjoy bracingly. “The general public glibly refers to this as being temperamental. If you have the temperament to put on a great performance, it’s asking too much of you that you should go home afterwards and cook the lamb chops with your own little hands. Or, in the case of a man, make yourself tamely agreeable to all and sundry.”

  “Do you think Mr. Warrender has any nerves?” asked Anthea, who had seized on that interesting possibility in preference to anything else that had been said.

  “Of course.”

  “Do you think he’s feeling nervous about tomorrow night, for instance?” Anthea was fascinated by the thought.

  “Well” — Enid Mountjoy smiled — “I suppose he has conducted Tosca often enough not to be exactly jittery about it. But naturally there is nervous tension about any evening when the chief responsibility of the performance rests on you. And of course,” she added, with good-humoured cynicism, “one always thinks that the chief responsibility rests on oneself.”

  “Did you ever sing in opera?” Anthea enquired.

  “No.” The older woman shook her head. “My heart was in it, but the fact that I was lame made it pretty well impossible for me to act on a stage.”

  “I forgot! I’m so sorry,” Anthea exclaimed warmly. “You’re so beautifully graceful and dignified that one never thinks of it, somehow.”

  “Thank you.” Enid Mountjoy smiled slightly. “But, as you will find, one has to be active and completely healthy and as strong as a horse to stand up to an operatic career. Some of them may look almost fragile, but they’re tough as steel really. And that’s what you’re going to have to be.”

  “You make me think I’m really going to succeed when you talk like that,” Anthea smiled.

  “Of course you are. I can’t imagine Oscar Warrender fostering a failure,” was the dry reply.

  Anthea thought of that several times during the day, with mingled satisfaction and apprehension. Particularly did she think of it the following evening, when she took her seat in the stalls at Covent Garden, and waited — tense with a sort of excited sense of anticipation — for him to come into the orchestra pit.

  As the lights went down, he came in so swiftly that he was at the conductor’s desk almost before she realised it.

  And he cut short the eager applause with a decisive down-beat which brought in the orchestra on the first chords of Tosca.

  After that, Anthea was away once more in the world of magic, fascinated not only by what was happening on the stage, but also by the extraordinary domination of the man at the conductor’s desk.

  The almost elemental power and force she had expected. But the subtle balance, the marvellous flexibility and the crystal-clear presentation of the work were quite outside her experience or expectation. She could not have said, of course, by what individual power he achieved his effects. She only knew that it was a performance of radiance and power, of infinite tenderness without false sentiment, of dark menace without bombast.

  “It’s extraordinary,” she heard someone say behind her in the first interval, “how Warrender cleans the score of all the accumulated coarseness and treacly sentiment spread on it by previous conductors, and gives one the work as a new and glorious thing.”

  “It’s a good left hand,” replied his companion. “Just watch that left hand.”

  So, in the second act, Anthea also watched that strong, beautiful, expressive left hand — when she was not breathlessly following the drama on the stage — and she thought she saw what the man behind her had meant. With that secure yet flexible beat of the baton he maintained the form and symmetry of the work, but with his left hand he translated into gesture for his orchestra every nuance of feeling he required of them.

  Anthea forgot that she hated him. She forgot that, less than forty-eight hours ago, she had upbraided him contemptuously for criticising Neil. She saw him simply as an overriding genius, who held the threads of a great performance in his hands. And in that moment she almost loved him for the way he could transport her.

  In the second interval she found Neil, who also seemed somewhat under the Warrender spell.

  “He’s an impossible devil,” Neil said ruefully, “as one saw all too well the other night. But tonight I take my hat off to him, whereas the other night I could have hit him on the jaw.”

  “I know what you mean! I’ve been sitting there thinking more or less the same thing,” Anthea confessed.

  “Well then, maybe we have to forgive him for being a so-and-so,” said Neil was a laugh.

  “No. To forgive is something different,” Anthea insisted obstinately. “I can’t forgive him for some things he has said and done. But I accept them as part of him. I can” — she swallowed slightly — “hate him as a man, but revere him as an artist. The two things are quite different.”

  “I daresay you’re right,” Neil agreed amusedly. “Well, keep your flag flying and don’t let him bully you too much. Are you still not coming out with me afterwards?”

  “No, I mustn’t — really.”

  “Very well. Are you going round backstage to see him?”

  “Oh, no, I don’t think so.”

  “Well, in case you do, I’ll say goodbye now. I’m going home in the morning.” And, bending his head, he kissed her, quite unaffectedly. “Shall I give your love to the family?”

  “Oh, indeed, indeed! To all of them. And tell them how I miss them, but that I’m working hard, and I mean they shall be proud of me one day,” she said eagerly. “And — and if you should ever think you’ve guessed who gave me this wonderful chance,” she added, on impulse, “tell him — her — whichever it is — that I’ll be grateful for the test of my days, whatever Oscar Warrender does to me.”

  “Darling girl, I will,” he promised, smiling into her eyes. And then the warning bell forced them to separate and go to their respective seats.

  During the orchestral opening to the third act, she was able to watch the conductor all the time. As she was seated a little to the side, she could see him very well, almost in profile, in the light from the orchestra, and she w
as reluctantly fascinated by the play of expression on that strong, handsome, faintly arrogant face. And then, just once, at a beautifully executed passage from the woodwind, she saw his quite wonderful smile flash out, and she thought suddenly,

  “How he loves it all! That’s why he can do it with that great romantic sweep. For all his arrogance, he serves the work with everything he has, like a dominating but adoring lover.”

  It was such an intriguing view of Oscar Warrender — the dominating but adoring lover — that she missed a short passage at that point, and did not come to until the tenor’s famous aria.

  She had heard this a hundred times before, of course. But it unfolded that night like the petals of a flower, so that she thought she must be hearing it for the first time. And she realised that the talented but slightly brash tenor was being held superbly in check by the conductor, so that everything which was beautiful in his voice was plain to hear, and everything slightly foolish in his approach was disciplined and moulded with infinitely stylish care.

  “I could go on my knees to him!” thought Anthea at the end. And she did not mean the tenor. Though, naturally, it was he who got the applause.

  At the very end of the performance, as Oscar Warrender turned to go, he sought and found Anthea’s glance, and made a slight, imperious sign to her to come round backstage. She faintly resented the form of summons. But she went.

  At the stage door she was allowed through without question. Indeed, the man at the door recognised her and said, “Mr. Warrender is in Room One.”

  So she took her way up to Room One, and knocked rather diffidently on the door.

  “Come in,” he called. And, when she went in, she found him sitting before the mirror, in a dressing-gown, brushing back his smooth fair hair, his eyes almost glittering with excitement still, although he looked slightly exhausted for once.

  “Hello — ” he pushed a chair forward for her. “How did you enjoy it?”

  “You were wonderful!” She had not meant to say that at all. She had meant to say that the work was shattering, or that Peroni sang superbly. But the other came out without her managing to prevent it.