by Jilly Cooper
‘My lovely child.’ Putting the bottle on the mantelpiece, Rodney advanced briskly.
‘Omigod,’ screamed Abby.
Flight to both doors was cut off, so she took the only possible way out, and went off into peals of laughter. After a second, Rodney joined in and they collapsed on the sofa, until the tears were running down their cheeks.
‘I thought you were gay, because you kissed the leader and you were so sympatico,’ said Abby, wiping her eyes.
‘Oh my dear, four wives to vouch to the contrary. Oh well, it was worth a try. You shouldn’t be so beautiful and so tall. Those stunning breasts at eye-level are beyond all temptation.’
‘What happened to your last wife?’
‘She died, three years ago, bless her. Wonderful old girl, used to play concertos in her nightie so she could go straight to bed afterwards.’
‘You must be so lonely.’
‘Not terribly darling, one’s always had a few little friends.’
‘Well, put on a bathrobe and I’ll make the scrambled eggs.’
After that they had a riotous evening, with Rodney regaling her with stories of the Great.
‘Henry Wood gave me my first concert after I came out of the Navy, and my first cigar. He was a charmer. You should do a prom, darling. You’d love it.’
‘They asked me,’ said Abby wistfully, ‘Christopher wanted too much money.’
Rodney frowned and topped up his glass of brandy.
‘I’ve heard that concerto so often, but tonight you made me listen to it completely afresh. I felt that strange excitement we all long for. Like the first time I saw David Gower pick up a bat, or the first time I heard Jacqueline du Pré pick up a bow. You have two matchless qualities, the ability to hold an audience captive and a unique sound that can never be mistaken for anyone else’s. But you’re dreadfully unhappy, aren’t you, darling.’ Gently he massaged her aching neck.
So Abby told him about Christopher.
‘We call him Chris-too-far over here,’ observed Rodney. ‘He’s avaricious, always pushes his artists too hard, gets as much money out of them as quickly as possible before they burn out. You ought to have been allowed to unwind after that exquisite concerto, or at least have tomorrow off, so you can have some fun, and do other things.’
‘I want to have a go at conducting.’
‘Don’t know how ready the world is for women conductors,’ mused Rodney. ‘Women in power are often unnecessarily brutal to their subordinates. Thatcher crushing her cabinet, who reacted with appalling spite. Musically you’re quite good enough, darling, you’ve got the authority too, but concert tickets tend to be bought by women and queers.’ He gave Abby a foxy nudge in the ribs. ‘And they prefer a glamorous bloke at the helm, and orchestras are very tricky, you’d only get by if they loved you.’
‘What about Edith Spink?’ protested Abby.
‘Edith’s a chap, and she’s got her composing, although her last symphony sounded as though a lot of drunken bears were having a saucepan fight.’
‘I must go,’ Abby leapt to her feet, as she suddenly noticed how old and tired he looked.
As he led her to the door, he begged her to come and stay in his house in Lucerne.
‘It’s on the lake and quite ravishing, there’ll be no passes, scout’s honour, and you’re going to come and play for my orchestra in Rutminster, ravishing country there too, and my boys and girls would love you.’
‘Shall I pack for you?’ asked Abby.
Rodney shook his head.
‘The sight of you bending over my suitcase,’ gently he patted her bottom, ‘would be too much for me. Goodnight, my new little friend.’ He stood on tiptoe to kiss her cheek.
‘You’d have enjoyed it, you know, there’s many a good tune played on an old fiddle, and I’m a spring chicken compared to your Stradivarius.’
Returning, still laughing, to the Hyatt Hotel and reality, Abby found an express parcel from Christopher.
Frantic with excitement, hoping for a gold bracelet or even a diamond pin as an act of atonement, Abby ripped it open and found six copies of the CD contract for the Mozart concertos. It was covered in primrose-yellow stickers telling her where to sign. Also enclosed was a brusque note from Christopher ordering her to return the contracts at once. A car would be waiting at Heathrow tomorrow to take her on to a rehearsal and recital at the Wigmore Hall. The next day she would start recording the Bartók concerto with the LSO.
‘If Declan O’Hara or Rupert Campbell-Black try to contact you, I cannot urge you too strongly to resist them,’ ended Christopher. ‘That’s the one thing that could, screw up the Rannaldini deal.’
I better call Rupert at once, thought Abby.
Five Mozart concertos, music she loved, spoilt for ever by bullying and screaming matches.
Her shoulders, her arms, her back and her neck still ached. In the old days, Christopher had cured her, rubbing in Tiger Balm, a mixture of herbs and menthol, and sooner or later his fingers had crept downwards in pursuit of pleasure. Abby groaned at the memory.
Taking her violin from its case, she cleaned its strings with eau-de-Cologne, then dusted its smooth flanks and delicate neck curving over into the seahorse head.
‘It’s you and me against the world, little fiddle,’ she said sadly. ‘If I don’t play you well enough, the bank will take you back again. You must have witnessed so much misery in two hundred and eighty years, but have you ever been played by anyone as lonely and unwanted as me?’
But that wasn’t true, Rupert had wanted her, and men’s hands had trembled when they’d asked her to sign their records this evening. Even Rodney’s jovial elephantine pass had made her aware she was desirable.
She was only so isolated, because Christopher, when he had wanted her had not wanted witnesses, and had driven away all her friends, and even her noisy fat mother. Pacing her room all night, she watched the sky lighten and the city emerge.
Far below she could now see a row of pretty pastel houses, the kind she would have loved to have settled down in, lining the bottle-green, oily waters of the canal, on which floated brightly coloured barges, attached at the centre like the petals of a flower. All round was debris, where bulldozers and cranes were in the process of flattening beautiful old russet buildings, churches, meeting houses and a factory with tall pipes. I’ll be bashed down before I have any chance to enjoy life, thought Abby, her eyes following the path of the canal which flowed under roads and bridges, past a man throwing sticks for his shaggy white dog, along a row of dark cypresses, into the mist, keeping its head down, amid the hubbub of the city. The hands of the little red clock-tower merged into one at six-thirty.
Abby flipped. She was enmeshed like Laocoon, she had to break free. First she chucked Rannaldini’s contracts out of the window. Blue birds of unhappiness, they wheeled downwards. Then she took the earliest shuttle to Heathrow, and booked herself onto Concorde.
Buoyed up by an excess of champagne, she wept over a piece in the Independent about Rachel Grant, the beautiful pianist, who’d been recording the Beethoven concertos with Rannaldini. She had evidently driven over a cliff because she’d seen a picture in The Scorpion of her husband sneaking out of the apartment of a former mistress. What a tragic loss to music, wrote the reporter.
Abby got stuck back into the champagne.
I’m immortal, she thought drunkenly as they approached New York. I could fly this aeroplane if they asked me and I can fly straight back into Christopher’s heart.
Still feeling immortal, she called Christopher on landing, but was utterly deflated to be told he was out. Sandra, his manipulative blonde secretary, had gone to the dentist. Christopher’s mobile had also been switched off. He was probably at a recording session, where they were not popular.
In despair, plunging down from the champagne, Abby took a taxi to her Riverside apartment. Geography was taking over. This was New York, every brick and street number reminded her of once being happy with Christopher. The r
iver looked grey, seal-like and unfriendly, boats were chugging sluggishly upstream like commuters. Someone had left the elevator door open, so she had to hump her bags up five floors.
Letting herself in, Abby gave a sigh of pleasure to see the pale peach walls, the dark peach carpet. Going into the living-room, she was startled to find an empty bottle of champagne, two glasses and a bunch of pale yellow roses, roughly rammed into a vase. Abby’s first terrified thought was burglars. Her eyes raced round the walls and furniture checking pictures, ornaments and silver, but everything seemed in place.
Then, as painful as stubbing one’s toe on a dog bowl in the dark, she noticed the grey pin-stripe jacket hanging on a chair. What, too, was the crocodile wallet she’d given Christopher doing on the glass table beside the keys she’d lovingly had cut so he could let himself into the apartment? A letter from Rupert had already been opened.
Somehow Abby’s buckling legs carried her next door. She had always wanted a beautiful bedroom. Other stars celebrate overnight fame with Ferraris, yachts or Picassos, or a Central Park penthouse. But Abby, as she practised nine hours a day and faced tiny, indifferent audiences in draughty halls, had only dreamt of a bower of bliss.
In the centre of the room was a vast four-poster, richly swagged with crimson velvet, hand-printed with vast blush-pink peonies. Half a dozen white lace pillows reared up like the Himalayas against the wrought-iron bedhead, which had been intricately woven into a pattern of treble and bass clefs; perfect to cling onto when she writhed like an electric eel above and below Christopher.
She had called in a lighting specialist, to cast a flattering rosy glow, so that Christopher, unlike Tithonus, would never grow old.
On the walls was more crimson velvet, on the polished floor rose-patterned rugs, and on the scarlet lacquer bedside tables, where she’d left them ten days ago, were two huge vases of lilies, whose petals were beginning to droop and wrinkle like old limp hands.
The only blot on her bed of crimson joy was Christopher filling his secretary, Sandra, in very non-dental fashion.
The horrified silence was broken by Abby.
‘That’s why you kept on at me to buy a New York apartment, so you could send me off on tour and hump this fat tramp in comfort,’ she yelled. ‘Why didn’t you use the office carpet, or the back seat of the Volvo like we used to? Does Beth know about Sandra? I figured it was key not to upset Beth.’
Looking round, she noticed the closet doors were open. Sandra had obviously been trying on her clothes. A peacock-blue party dress lay inside out on the floor. A bottle of lemon-and-rosemary oil stood unstoppered by the bed.
‘I’m surprised you bother with that stuff, Sandra,’ Abby addressed Sandra, almost chattily, ‘the only thing Christopher enjoys having massaged is his ego.’
For a frozen moment Christopher panicked — then he wriggled out from underneath Sandra, and wrapping a red towel round his loins, advanced on Abby.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he thundered. ‘How dare you let the Wigmore Hall down. I hope you weren’t photographed coming off the aeroplane, or they’ll figure you’ve accepted another booking. Shepherd Denston are backing that concert, we stand to lose a lot of money,’ he glanced at his watch on the bedside table, ‘unless you get back on that aeroplane at once.’
Abby looked at him in bewilderment.
‘I cannot believe what I’m hearing.’ Holding her hands over her ears, she stumbled out to the kitchen.
Christopher followed her, determined to bluff it out.
How dare she treat with Rupert behind his back; how dare she leave Rosalie in the lurch, and swan off with that old reprobate Rodney Macintosh.
Abby’s eyes were rolling, she was as grey with shock as the river outside. Christopher could smell the champagne sour on her breath. He was just reaching the fortissimo climax of his fury, when Abby told him she had chucked Rannaldini’s contract out of the window.
‘It’s now being dumped on by Birmingham pigeons, which is what it deserves. You don’t give a fuck about me. I’m just the eternal jackpot on the fruit machine. How many millions of notes have I played to buy this apartment, and you’ve just desecrated it. Well, you’ve blown it this time.’
Seizing the carving knife, which Sandra had used to level the bottom of the rose stems, Abby bent back her other hand, almost abstractedly examining the veins, faint as biro marks, on the inside wrist. Then, raising the knife, she made a deep cut, half an inch above her watch-strap.
Seeing her hand hanging like a snowdrop, spurting blood, and the agency’s livelihood gushing away, Christopher leapt forward to stop her slashing her right one.
‘Not your bowing hand, for Christ’s sake.’
SEVEN
Abby was raced to hospital. Micro, neuro and plastic surgeons jetted in from all over the world to save her career. After a seven-hour operation, including a massive blood transfusion, they managed to repair both the tendons and the arteries and suture the nerve sheaths. As the nerves had been severed, she was spared a lot of pain when she came round. That would come later as the nerves grew back pitifully slowly at a millimetre a day.
She was kept heavily sedated with tranquillizers, antibiotics and painkillers pouring in through the drip. Counsellors poured in, too, and physiotherapists to waggle gently the lifeless fingers.
Abby had no movement left. She couldn’t cup her hand, move her thumb across to her little finger or open and shut or splay her fingers at all. She would have to wear a splint for months to stop her hand contracting like a vulture’s claw, which meant all the muscles would waste.
Abby asked only one question: would she ever play the violin again?
‘In time,’ said the chief consultant. ‘If you persevere with the physio. The nerves will take at least a year to regenerate, then we’ll be able to tell more. Whether you’ll ever play to concert standard is doubtful. There’s too much pressure put on young soloists today.’
Abby was devastated. There were fears for her sanity, as she sobbed uncontrollably for hours on end, or gazed blankly into space.
How could she have deliberately destroyed her God-given talent just to break out of Christopher’s boa-constrictor stranglehold, to spite him because he no longer loved her?
Christopher had tried to hush up the story, arrogantly ordering Abby to say nothing, as he passed himself off as the lone boy-scout hero whose tourniquet had saved Abby’s life. Unfortunately, the porter in Abby’s block had noticed Sandra going in and out. Who could forget those knockers in a hurry?
Christopher had also patronized and ridden roughshod over too many people and wriggled out of paying for too many lunches to have many friends in the Press. The result was a monumental scandal, particularly at such a tragic loss of a unique talent.
‘TIGRESS AND CHEATER,’ shouted the headlines over huge pictures of a smouldering Abby and a sanctimonius Christopher. Christopher had also lied about the fact that Beth had found out. She had had no idea and was wiped out by such betrayal, which made Abby feel infinitely worse.
Nor were matters helped by Hermione, who was at first irked by the massive coverage, then, when it showed no signs of abating, decided to cash in and fly to New York.
‘CARING HERMIONE IN MERCY DASH,’ announced The Scorpion with a picture of the great diva on the hospital steps clutching a bunch of already drooping roses and her latest CD, label out, as presents for Abby.
Ignoring the fact that after thirty seconds Abby had rung down in hysterics to have her chucked out, Hermione afterwards told the army of reporters that she had advised Abigail to involve herself in charity work.
‘“Think of the poor people of Rwanda,” I urged her. “At least you are being looked after by wonderfully caring hospital staff.” I hope the sacred message of my latest CD, Heavenly Hermione, will bring her spiritual refreshment.’
Abby, who’d had to be given a massive shot of Valium, wasn’t remotely cheered up five minutes later when Rupert sauntered in. He was in New York
to check out laser surgery for Xav’s birthmark, and arrived with a carrier bag over his head.
‘What in hell are you doing?’ snarled Abby.
‘Hiding from Hermione.’
‘She’s only interested in your beautiful hands, and they’re still on show.’
‘Actually she’s far too busy fighting for access to the make-up department with all those consultants, who are becoming television stars, providing bulletins on your progress.’
He removed the carrier bag and smoothed his hair. He was wearing a love-in-the-mist blue shirt which matched his long blue eyes, which in turn matched the patch of blue sky which was all Abby could see through her window. Part of a sunny outside world, which seemed lost for ever.
‘Poor old duck,’ said Rupert, remembering the bleak horror of Taggie’s miscarriages. ‘It must be like losing a baby.’
‘Far, far worse,’ Abby snapped. ‘Like losing a thousand babies. Every time I played a concert, I gave birth.’
Rupert was appalled by her appearance. A forelock of dark hair fell damp and flat to her eyebrows. Her fleshless face was dominated more than ever by the haunted, heavily shadowed yellow eyes. The only plumpness left was in the curve of her lower lip. She had lost twenty pounds. Seeing her huddled, wide-shouldered, long-legged body, Rupert was reminded of some shell-shocked youth fatally wounded in the trenches.
Getting out his fountain-pen, he drew a blue cross on the inside of her right wrist just where it joined her hand.
‘This is the place if you want to top yourself properly. You did it too far up the arm, just means the nerves take longer to grow back.’
‘Will they?’
‘Course they will. I had no feeling for six months after I trapped a nerve at the LA Olympics; Ricky France-Lynch’s arm took nearly three years; my son-in-law Luke’s hand was pulverized by a polo ball. We all got better.’