A Song Begins (Warrender Saga Book 1)

by Mary Burchell

  “A lot you know about it,” he retorted amusedly, as he got up and went over to wash his hands. “How well do you think you can assess conducting yet?”

  “It’s a good left hand. I did discover that,” retorted Anthea. At which he turned and came slowly back to her, a towel in his hands.

  “How did you know that?” he enquired, in genuine surprise.

  “I — I heard someone behind me say so,” she admitted, “and so I watched, and I saw it was, too.”

  He threw back his head and laughed then, so that she thought, “He’s almost unfairly handsome.” And then he patted her cheek sharply, with his still damp hand and said, “You’re learning. What did you think of Peroni?”

  “What can one think? She’s simply marvellous, isn’t she?”

  “Yes. She was simply marvellous tonight,” he agreed, his deep, expressive voice making the words sound almost like a caress.

  “I wonder if he’ll ever think me marvellous like that?” thought Anthea, with a stab of something like pain.

  And at that moment there was a light tap at the door, and Peroni’s lovely full voice called, “Maestro, can I come in? Are you decent?”

  “Reasonably so,” he replied. And, tossing away the towel, he went to the door to admit the heroine of the evening.

  She was still in her last act costume, and as she swept into the small room, Anthea got up instinctively and backed against the dressing-table to make way for her.

  “My dear” — she actually put both her hands round the conductor’s face and reached up to kiss him — “what can I say? You were wonderful tonight.”

  “You were wonderful,” he retorted, smiling down at her. “All right. We both were.” She laughed and put her arms round his neck for a moment. “We’re good on our own, but together we are unbeatable. We ought to be together — much more, Oscar.”

  “We should probably murder each other,” he assured her lightly. But he still smiled down at her, and actually touched her cheek, with a half tender, half teasing gesture.

  Watching them, Anthea felt devastatingly superfluous. Giulia Peroni still wore, like a shining garment, the fascination and glamour of her performance, and in a curious way Oscar Warrender, too, was like a great stage figure in that moment. For Anthea there was no role except of humble audience — of whom they seemed totally unaware.

  In this belief she was wrong, however. He at least did not remain totally unaware of her. He turned, his arm lightly round Peroni, and said,

  “I don’t think you have met my pupil, Anthea Benton.”

  “Your — pupil?” Peroni took in Anthea’s existence a trifle unwillingly, but she smiled — a beautiful, gracious smile. “I didn’t know you had pupils!”

  “I don’t — usually.” But he did not say that it was unheard-of, Anthea noticed.

  “Is she specially gifted, then?” Peroni’s brilliant glance passed over Anthea again, with a curiosity which was not unfriendly, but was reminiscent of visiting Royalty receiving a small-town official.

  “She shows glimmerings of promise occasionally,” he replied, before Anthea could even look hopefully expectant. “At other times I think I’m just wasting my time.”

  “It isn’t like you — to waste your time.” The singer smiled up at him again.

  “No?”

  “She is a lucky girl.” All the time, she spoke of Anthea rather than to her. “To be your pupil! My God, what would I have given for such a chance at her age! I suppose” — the smile became rather mischievous — “she adores you?”

  “You would have to ask Anthea herself that,” was the amused retort.

  “Well?” Peroni glanced indulgently at Anthea. “It goes without saying, eh? We work for him — we adore him.”

  For a second Anthea met the conductor’s intensely amused glance, and she saw that he was enjoying her dilemma. Then she replied quite coolly,

  “I think, Madame, I am perhaps not the adoring kind. I admire — even revere — Mr. Warrender for his genius. I do not adore him as a person, and I think he would be embarrassed if I did.”

  “Oh, it takes quite a lot to embarrass me,” murmured the conductor, while Peroni laughed, on a not very pleased note, and exclaimed,

  “She is cold. You will not make an artist of her if she remains as cold as that, the little one.”

  “We’ll see,” he replied calmly. “You shouldn’t have pressed her, Giulia. She is truthful — and she doesn’t like me.”

  “Oh — like!” The Italian considered the word and rejected it contemptuously. “One doesn’t like you, caro mio. One either loves or hates you. Sometimes both at the same time.”

  He laughed a good deal at that, and said,

  “Well, my beautiful, emotional dynamo, we will leave that question for the moment. Go and change now, or we shall be late for supper.”

  She made a slightly protesting grimace, but she went. Without, Anthea noticed, bothering to recognise her own existence again.

  When the door had closed behind her, he said, “You had better go too, Anthea. It’s late enough. And go straight home, mind! No hanging about with your swain from Cromerdale.”

  “Do you have to make it sound so offensive?” she asked angrily.

  He laughed again at that. A good deal seemed to amuse him that evening. And he said, with a wicked glance at her,

  “It’s an insurance against Peroni’s threat. I couldn’t have an adoring pupil around, you know.”

  “You needn’t worry!” she flashed out at him. “I don’t even like you, as you said. And, if Madame Peroni is right and one either loves or hates you — I know which I do!”

  She turned on what she considered a good exit line and would have gone. But, to her astonishment and dismay, he leaned forward and caught her back against him, and she saw, in the mirror opposite, that he was smiling down at her with dangerous brilliance.

  “Well, which is it, Anthea?” he said, and for a moment his arms were almost painfully tight around her.

  She slowly tipped back her head against his shoulder and looked up at him.

  “What do you think?” she demanded, with cool scorn.

  “I’ve sometimes wondered,” he replied outrageously. And, bending his head, he kissed her full on her mouth before he let her go.

  CHAPTER VI

  “How — how dare you do such a thing?” Anthea turned and faced him then, her eyes dark and wide. “I never said you could kiss me. I never intended — ”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake! Don’t be so melodramatic about it,” he exclaimed impatiently. And suddenly he was the tired, rather jaded man who had had enough of the evening. “A kiss counts for nothing in the theatre world. There’s no need to have heroics. Run along with you — home to your Kensington boarding-house. I’m late already.”

  She wanted to hurl some verbal thunderbolt at him, to say something — anything — that would make him feel the full weight of her scorn and detestation of him. But he had already turned away from her, and she had the strangely chilling impression that she scarcely existed for him any more.

  Shaking with anger, and a sort of dismay which she could neither identify nor explain to herself, she went out of the room. A good many people were clustered in the corridor outside, and some of them glanced at her curiously because she had been allowed to go into the great man’s room before them.

  But Anthea hardly noticed them, as she made her way past, and then down the stone stairs and along to the stage door.

  “Go straight home,” he had ordered her, and she had thought that was what she was going to do. But, when she saw the crowd round the stage door, something stronger than her sense of obedience — stronger perhaps than her common sense — checked her. She moved no farther than the fringe of the crowd. And there she waited, in the shadows of Floral Street, until he should come out.

  Once or twice, when the night breeze blew chill (as it always does down Floral Street), Anthea thought she should go home. But she could not tear herself away.


  She saw the tenor come out, and give autographs to devoted admirers. And then presently there was a concerted surge forward, a chorus of, “There she is!” and a moment later Peroni — radiant and lovely — stood in the doorway, with Oscar Warrender behind her.

  He was smiling and obviously in a good mood. And, although Anthea, in safe obscurity, was too far away to hear what was said, she gathered that he made some joke, for the crowd near him roared with laughter, and Peroni gave him a very sparkling glance.

  Anthea felt strangely aimless and detached from the scene. Like a child pressing its nose against a shop window to gaze at the Christmas display, without any hope of ever sharing it.

  “I can’t bear him!” she told herself. “I could have killed him when he kissed me in that casual, almost insulting way.”

  But she still seemed to feel the firm pressure of that strong, arrogant, smiling mouth on hers. And when the couple in the stage-doorway finally made a move to go, and he lightly adjusted the mink wrap round Peroni’s beautiful shoulders, she found she was gripping her hands together until they hurt.

  They were in the car now, Oscar Warrender in the driving seat, and, as they slowly drew clear of the crowd, Anthea stood there, forgetting everything but the sight of those two, close together in smiling intimacy.

  Perhaps she relied too much on the protection of the poor street lighting. Certainly she had not realised how quickly the pattern of individuals in a crowd can shift. As the car moved off, she was suddenly left rather isolated, some way down the street, on the edge of the pavement. And, as the car drew level, he saw her, jerked the car almost to a standstill and, speaking sternly and distinctly from the half-open window, he said,

  “Go home at once, Anthea. I don’t expect to repeat my orders twice.”

  Then he drove on, with the smiling Peroni beside him, and Anthea was left standing there, in a street which had suddenly become drab and a little forlorn.

  One or two of the diminishing crowd came up to her and someone said, “Lucky you! What did he say to you?”

  “He just said goodnight,” murmured Anthea.

  “Isn’t she lovely — ” exclaimed someone else. “They say he’s been in love with her for years, and that’s why he’s never married.”

  But Anthea had had enough. She pushed her way past the remaining stragglers and made her way to Covent Garden Tube Station. And, on the way home in the train, she found it quite extraordinarily difficult not to cry. Though why she could hardly have said.

  No one else was up when she got in, not even the devoted Vicki, and in a mood of inexplicable depression, Anthea went to bed. Or rather, she went to her room and sat on the side of the bed and tried to analyse her own curious reactions.

  “It was a wonderful performance,” she told herself. “I ought to feel elated — by that, if nothing else. Peroni is everything he said she was. She didn’t like me, though. I didn’t like her, really. Not that that matters.”

  She got up and began slowly to undress.

  “I needn’t have made such a fuss about his kissing me, I suppose. He’s quite right when he says a kiss means nothing in the theatre world. It didn’t mean a thing. Nor did that light kiss he gave me in the studio. Not a thing.”

  But instead of being reassured by this reflection she felt, if anything, even more dejected.

  “One feels so — so flat, going home alone,” she told herself. “Particularly when other people are going out to supper to enjoy themselves. I wonder where they were going. He didn’t say she couldn’t stay up late. But I suppose when you get to Peroni’s position you can allow yourself a few indulgences. She’s absurdly possessive about him. Or maybe she kisses everyone in that way. No, I don’t think so somehow. Only him. Oh, what does it matter, anyway?” During the next few weeks, Anthea alternated between elation and despair, as she began to take the full measure of the task on which she had started.

  In the early days, everything had seemed at least to move forward, even though the sessions with Oscar Warrender had been painful. But now she went through the stage of being unsure of herself. And the more she longed to secure his unqualified approval, the more it seemed to her that this was an impossible goal to attain.

  “Don’t torment yourself about it,” Enid Mountjoy urged her kindly, when Anthea was in the depths of despair one day. “It’s always like that with all of us. First one is astonished at the things one learns with comparative ease. Then one is appalled by the things one doesn’t know. You’re not at all peculiar in this, I assure you. After a while you will gain a sense of proportion and balance the weaknesses against the strengths. You’re doing astonishingly well, as a matter of fact.”

  This, however, did not appear to be Oscar Warrender’s view.

  He had arranged by now for her to attend some of the rehearsals at the Opera House, but he was cruelly impatient if she failed to draw from them the lessons and conclusions he expected.

  “You’re amazingly resistant to some of the simplest discoveries,” he told her once. “I begin to wonder why I ever bothered about you.”

  “Because of the money, I suppose,” she flung at him angrily.

  “What money?”

  He looked surprised, and again she realised that he took Neil Prentiss’s fantastic generosity almost entirely for granted. Probably, she reflected angrily, he even considered it something of a favour on his part to accept it.

  So her tone was very cool as she said, with crude distinctness,

  “The very handsome amount of money which I imagine you’re being paid for teaching me.”

  “Oh, that.” He shrugged casually, almost disparagingly.

  “You may forget about it, but I never do. Not one single day. I dislike some of the aspects of my training intensely — and I need not tell you which. But I know it’s first-class, and I’ll be grateful to my dying day to the man who has given me this chance.”

  “Very touching,” he said. “But hard work and intelligence go much further than a lot of sentimental devotion, you know. Let’s go back to what really matters. That’s the best way you can show your undying gratitude to the gentleman concerned.”

  “Why do you dislike Neil so much?” she cried. “You always speak of him in that patronising, disparaging way.”

  “I?” He looked genuinely surprised again. “I haven’t the slightest feeling about your Neil Prentiss, one way or the other. So long as he doesn’t distract you from the real purpose of your existence, that is.”

  “And the real purpose of my existence, in your view, is just to be a singer?”

  “Don’t say ‘just to be a singer’, in that idiotic way,” he retorted, with a sudden and almost violent spurt of anger. “To be a singer — as distinct from a halfwit with a voice — is to have justified your existence, to have answered to heaven for the gifts bestowed upon you, and incidentally to have been touched with the finger of immortality. Now let’s get on with the lesson.”

  So they got on with the lesson.

  They sparred incessantly during this period, and sometimes Anthea was almost exhausted by the emotional struggle between them. But, however much he might reduce her to despair between lessons, he always had the power to inspire her and drive her on to further effort when she was actually with him.

  “Sometimes,” she told Vicki, “I think that if he ordered me to climb up the side of the Opera House, I’d make the attempt, and somehow manage to do it.”

  “He’ll find you something a bit more rewarding than that, I hope,” retorted Vicki with a laugh.

  “But just as hard,” sighed Anthea. And the following day her prophecy was almost dramatically fulfilled.

  It was at a rehearsal which she had specially wanted to attend. Otello was back in the repertoire, but this time with Oscar Warrender conducting, and she was eager beyond expression to hear him handle this score which fascinated her.

  All the morning she sat there in the dark, almost empty Opera House, oblivious of everything and everyone but
the people on the stage and the man at the conductor’s desk.

  She wished passionately that the Desdemona were better, more lyrical and sympathetic. But she supposed sadly that good Desdemonas do not grow on every bush (in which she was perfectly right), and that one had to be satisfied with Ottila Franci, the same, not very satisfactory one she had heard in the performance some weeks ago.

  Certainly Oscar Warrender drove the singer to something more than she had achieved on that first evening. But she was, Anthea realised, essentially unmusical, and it became increasingly obvious to Anthea that the conductor’s patience was nearing breaking point.

  It seemed the singer realised this too, for she became a little wild in her singing, made frequent signs of distress, and finally, just before the last act, she announced that she could not continue.

  Everything was against her, she explained volubly. Her throat — she caressed it with an anxious hand. Her head — more gestures to indicate how her poor head was spinning. And her nerves! Her nerves had been too severely tried. And here she directed an angry, half-tearful glance at the conductor’s desk.

  The other artists stood about the stage rather aimlessly, and the soprano looked over her handkerchief at Oscar Warrender, to see if he would come to heel and plead with her to go on.

  He did nothing of the kind, however. Instead, he turned and called into the dark cavern of the empty auditorium,

  “Anthea, are you there?”

  “Y-yes, Mr. Warrender.” She rose from her seat halfway back in the stalls and came hastily down the aisle to him.

  “Get up there on that stage and stand in for the last act,” he commanded.

  “St-stand in?” she gasped. “For the Desdemona, do you mean?”

  “I wasn’t suggesting you should do Otello,” he replied disagreeably. “Hurry, now. We’ve had enough frustration and delay for one morning.”

  “But I couldn’t possibly do it!” she exclaimed, appalled by the prospect. “I’ve never even been on a stage before. I — ”

  “There always has to be a first time.”

  “But not like this,” she pleaded. “With no preparation at all, no chance even to — ”