Appassionata rc-5

by Jilly Cooper

  He had brought her a bunch of lilies of the valley, and a little silver replica of a head of garlic.

  ‘That’s to ward off evil, you’re to keep it beside you all the time. Taggie’s also made you a tin of fudge. She sent love and said she was dreadfully sorry.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Abby listlessly. ‘Did you get your baby?’

  ‘We got two, Xavier and Bianca. Flew them home last week. The grooms had hung a welcome home banner across the gate and balloons all up the drive. Edith Spink brought the Cotchester Chamber Orchestra over in a bus to play “Congratulations”. All the dogs had bows, it was great. Xavier couldn’t believe his eyes. He’s walking all over the place now. And his first word was Daddy, so he’s obviously going to be a diplomat.’

  Rupert gave a big yawn.

  ‘Sorry, we’re not getting much sleep at the moment. Bianca’s routine’s all out of sync.’

  His tearing spirits made Abby feel even more dreadful, particularly as they kept being interrupted by nurses popping in to check Abby’s fingers for gangrene and gaze at Rupert.

  ‘They never allow me a second to brood,’ groaned Abby. ‘And oh God, the counsellor’s due at three o’clock.’

  ‘Don’t believe in that crap,’ said Rupert. ‘Only person who can sort you out is yourself. Counsellors are flooding into Penscombe at the moment. There’s a ghastly beard with an Adam’s apple who’s got a crush on Taggie and keeps forecasting disaster because we’ve adopted a black child. He asked me yesterday whether I was going to teach Xav the customs of his country? Did he want me to give Xav a line of coke for breakfast, I said.’

  But Abby wasn’t listening, being too wrapped up in her own tragedy.

  ‘I can’t do Declan’s programme now,’ she said sulkily, ‘if that’s what you’ve come for.’

  Rupert’s face softened.

  ‘I came to see you, because I was dead worried and because I like you a lot. Classical music bores the tits off me, reminds me of my first wife, but you made it as exciting,’ Rupert cast round, ‘as a good Gold Cup.’

  Abby started to cry. Rupert took her in his arms.

  For a second, Abby clung to him enjoying the muscular warmth, then, as the counsellor came in, she screamed with rage: ‘Is there no peace except beyond the grave?’

  ‘Don’t talk like that,’ chided the counsellor. ‘She’s doing great,’ she added to Rupert.

  ‘I must go,’ Rupert got to his feet. ‘The only answer,’ he ruffled Abby’s hair, ‘is to become a conductor. That shit Rannaldini needs some competition.’

  Shepherd Denston, who were in turmoil, were fast coming to the same conclusion.

  ‘If only Abby’d done the job properly,’ grumbled Howard on a conference call to Christopher and young Howie in London, ‘she could have become a cult figure like James Dean or Marilyn Monroe.’

  ‘Not enough mileage,’ said young Howie. ‘She’s better alive. We gotta find something for her to do.’

  Shepherd Denston needed the money. It was not just the houses on Long Island and the old masters and young mistresses, acquired on the expectation of Abby’s massive income. The agency had also extended themselves dangerously, backing concerts throughout Eastern Europe, only to find the newly free populations were hungrier for new cars than culture.

  ‘What a pity that contract with Rannaldini never got signed,’ said Howard.

  ‘We better get her Strad back,’ said Christopher briskly. ‘Can’t let it lie idle. Maria needs a decent instrument.’

  Maria Kusak was Abby’s bitterest rival, one of the agency’s rising stars.

  ‘Fact that Abby’s pulled through suicide, like coming off drugs, or cracking anorexia, is gonna evoke public sympathy,’ said Howie, then groaned as his secretary handed him a fax saying that Benny Basanovich had been so drunk in Munich he’d skipped pages of Prokofiev’s Third Concerto before falling off the piano-stool.

  ‘The only answer,’ said Howard, ‘is for her to learn to conduct, while we see if her hand’s gonna recover.’

  For now though, Abby must leave the limelight until the scandal had died down. Sir Rodney Macintosh, who’d said some uncomfortingly sharp things to Christopher after the accident, gallantly came to the rescue, and offered Abby the use of his house on Lake Lucerne.

  ‘The wild flowers are out of this world, darling, and the mountain air is purer arid more exhilarating than Krug.’

  Rodney’s ancient housekeeper, Gisela, who was used to temperamental artists, would build up Abby’s strength. There was every score in the world to work on. She could have a resident physio and a succession of student conductors to teach her the rudiments.

  Christopher, everyone decided, must bow out of Abby’s life. Another reason why Lucerne was a good idea. Her career, in future, would be handled by the London office and, when he wasn’t racing all over Europe to sort out the chaos caused by Benny Basanovich, by Howie Denston.

  EIGHT

  Clutching her silver clove of garlic, Abby arrived in Lucerne. Rodney met her and, with a series of loud bangs, singing: ‘All boys are cheap today, cheaper than yesterday,’ to the tune of ‘La Donna e mobile’, drove her out to his house along the lake.

  Known as Flasher’s Folly, it stood on the town side of a wooded peninsula, which seemed to crawl into the lake like a huge furry caterpillar. The house itself was square, black gabled, with a mossy red roof and warm yellow walls smothered in white wisteria. The oak front door was thirty yards from the water’s edge. Behind the house was a lawn flanked by honeysuckle, rose colonnades and a water garden fed by two springs. Separating the garden from the mountains was an orchard and a copse of linden trees. Rodney’s fourth wife, the one who’d played concertos in her nightie, had plainly been a wonderful gardener.

  ‘We’ve had some great parties over the years,’ Rodney squeezed Abby’s shoulder. ‘In heatwaves we often bathed starkers in the lake at midnight.’

  The entire attic was set aside for Rodney’s train sets. He could run ten trains simultaneously along the tracks without any crashes.

  ‘The secret of conducting is to be able to do ten things at once.’

  Abby’s big bedroom took up most of the second floor and had windows front and back. As well as a four-poster with sprigged white-and-yellow muslin curtains, it contained a piano, a record player, bookshelves packed with every score from Purcell to Gorecki, a stuffed bear wearing a Victorian bishop’s mitre and, among other pictures on the pale Parma-violet walls, a portrait of Rodney’s second cousin, Myrtle, who’d become a missionary.

  Apart from Gisela, the household included Rodney’s cat, Shostakovich, a huge, indolent charmer with long grey hair and big orange eyes, who usually lay around in pools of sunlight, but who was currently weaving round Abby’s legs, being driven crazy by a heady smell of coq au vin from the kitchen.

  ‘Oh wow, how lovely to have a cat.’ Ecstatically Abby bent to stroke Shosty, as he was known. But as she gathered him up, her left hand couldn’t support him, and he crashed to the floor, flouncing off on fluffy grey plus-fours.

  ‘Lands on his feet like his master,’ said Rodney reassuringly.

  Like Rupert, he was horrified by Abby’s appearance; so tall, thin and pale, a tree stricken by lightning. She touched her left hand constantly, desperate for the return of any feeling.

  To distract her he led her to the front window. Outside, the shimmering pale blue lake seemed to merge into the powder-blue mist and the grey-blue sky without any horizon. But gradually snowy white peaks began to appear.

  ‘Look darling, they’re all coming out to welcome you. Those are the Riga Mountains and that big crooked peak is Mount Pilatus, named after Pontius Pilate. Legend has it that after he sentenced Christ to death, he came here to suffer for his sins.’

  Pilate and me, thought Abby bleakly.

  ‘I can think of worse places. It’s better than Croydon,’ said Rodney.

  Woods were now emerging on the opposite shore. ‘Now you can see Tribschen,’ he went
on, pointing to the prettiest white doll’s house on a high grassy mound, ‘where Cosima lived with Wagner and, before he became a conductor, Hans Richter worked there as Wagner’s secretary.’

  ‘Richter,’ for a second Abby was roused out of her apathy, ‘my hero. He was such a brilliant musician. Orchestras just adored him.’

  She didn’t add that with his beard, mane of hair, broad shoulders and air of authority, Richter had looked rather like Christopher. Richter, however, had been a devoted husband. A Christopher with honour. But she must forget Christopher. Hopelessly she clutched her silver garlic.

  Aware of her misery, Rodney pointed to an island of trees rising out of the water about fifty yards from the shore.

  ‘After a long day of copying out The Mastersingers, Richter, a very strong man, used to row across the lake from Tribschen at dusk, embark on that island and practise the French horn, thus starting another legend of a mysterious ghost horn player.’

  Leaning out of the window on those early summer evenings, waiting for the stars to come out, Abby often imagined she could hear the first sweet notes of a horn, but they were only owls hooting and the cries of the water birds.

  Looking back on her first few months in Lucerne, Abby was appalled that she behaved quite so horribly. Generous, passionate, demanding, workaholic, her last twelve years had been dominated by Christopher and more recently by her Strad, which had now gone back to the bank. Abby missed the Strad even more than Christopher; her relationship with the violin had been so close, so joyous, so tactile, so successful, it had been like taking a beloved dog back to a rescue kennel. And the heartbreaking beauty of her surroundings only made her loss worse.

  The doctors were pleased with her. By October the severed muscles had knit so she now had some movement in her fingers, but she still had no grip and no feeling in her palms or her fingertips.

  Her worst problem, however, was her inability to relax. Raging at the slowness of her physical recovery, she plunged into conducting, standing in front of the long gold mirror in her room endlessly waving a baton to records, trying to anticipate the entrances of the various instruments, or giving herself blinding headaches poring over scores long into the night.

  Her main difficulty was having to conduct in a vacuum. If only she could have returned from Lucerne with a case of different musicians, set them up like chess pieces, breathed life into them, and rehearsed and rehearsed them until she dropped.

  ‘How can I practise without an orchestra?’ she raged at Rodney. ‘It’s like learning to be a good lay from reading sex books.’

  ‘I could certainly help you with the latter,’ said Rodney.

  ‘It isn’t a joke.’

  So Rodney in his sweetness, for her twenty-sixth birthday on 26 October, rounded up all his musician pals in Lucerne and Geneva, the twenty-strong local choir and four soloists, and arranged for them to spend the weekend at Flasher’s Folly.

  The plan was for Abby to rehearse The Messiah with them on Saturday and Sunday and then give a performance in front of an invited audience on Sunday night. Abby was so excited and terrified, she became utterly impossible. Desperate for evidence that her hand was better, she was also constantly and recklessly testing it.

  Rodney only spent about a third of the year in Lucerne and Gisela liked everything to be perfect. On the Friday morning before the concert, gold leaves were tumbling into the lake, but it was so warm she had laid breakfast outside. Café au lait, bacon and mushrooms picked at dawn from the orchard, home-made croissants and apricot jam were all served on and in rose-patterned gold-leaf plates, cups and saucers, part of a priceless set of twelve.

  Rodney, who was whipping through The Times crossword, which was faxed out to him from Rutminster every morning, always had his orange juice out of a heavy glass tumbler, of which he was inordinately proud. Engraved with his name and a picture of a puffing train, it had been presented to him by his orchestra on his seventy-fifth birthday last year.

  Gisela, despite being old and rheumaticky, hated to be helped. But Abby was desperate to prove her grip was getting stronger, so the moment breakfast was over, she stacked everything including Rodney’s tumbler onto the tray.

  ‘I’ll carry it.’ In alarm Rodney put down The Times.

  ‘I’m OK.’

  The next moment, Abby’s hand had slipped and everything had smashed into a hundred pieces on the flagstones.

  ‘Why the hell don’t you leave things alone?’ shouted Rodney.

  Too horrified to apologize, Abby stormed upstairs leaving the mess. Within seconds the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ was blaring out of her bedroom. And when Rodney stumped angrily upstairs to play with his trains, Abby had ostentatiously banged her windows shut to blot out the sound of shouting, whistling and hooting. Even when Shostakovich appeared mewing at the window Abby screamed at him to go away. He had a maddening habit of sitting on scores, or leaping onto her shoulders like a witch’s cat when she was giving her all to some elaborate aria.

  At one o’clock, she was playing ‘Worthy is the Lamb’ so loudly that she didn’t hear Gisela’s tentative knock, so Gisela let herself in. Always trying to tempt Abby to eat more, she had made her a pale pink smoked salmon soufflé, wild strawberry ice-cream, and had squeezed her a glass of her favourite pink-grapefruit juice. Also on the tray, which she placed on the table by the window, was a bowl of vitamins and a posy of mauve autumn crocuses.

  Abby went beserk.

  ‘For Chrissake, how many times do I have to tell you, I’ll come down when I want to eat.’

  Gisela’s kind, rosy face crumpled in dismay.

  Upstairs the 8.10 from Zurich ran into the 10.55 from Geneva with a crash, as Rodney toddled downstairs. His station-master’s cap, askew over his eye, did nothing to diminish the roaring rage on his face.

  ‘How dare you shout at Gisela like that, you spoilt brat! Everyone is falling over themselves to be nice to you. Gisela and I are going into Lucerne this afternoon and if you’re not in a better mood when we get home, you can pack your bags and get out.’

  Again, Abby was too distraught to apologize. But after they had gone she sobbed her hopelessly muddled heart out. How could she have been so ungrateful? God would punish her by never allowing her to play the violin again.

  ‘Oh please, what gets into me?’

  Wearily she picked up her stick and the battered yellow score of The Messiah. It was cheating to conduct to a record, and made her lazy and slow to adjust. Rodney’s musicians, if he hadn’t already told them not to turn up for such an ungrateful cow, would probably play it in a completely different way. She’d have to sing and imagine it in her head.

  Handel’s original version of The Messiah was scored for a very small orchestra and Abby had arranged her room so each instrument was represented by a different object. The bookshelf on her left was the First Violins, the chest of drawers next door the Second Violins. The faded crimson armchair the First Oboe, the trouser press the Second Oboe, the stuffed bear in the mitre seemed appropriately august to play both bassoons.

  Rodney’s beady Cousin Myrtle, gazing down between the windows, which looked on to the back garden, represented the violas. And Abby’s white-and-yellow four-poster, against the right-hand wall, which she hadn’t made yet, had to act as the harpsichord.

  The Messiah begins with the entire orchestra playing together loudly and gravely for twenty-four bars. Abby glared round the room to see that everyone was paying attention, paused and raised her baton. Rannaldini was said to have a down beat that could halve butter straight from the freezer. Abby was determined to be as incisive. One, her stick whistled downwards, two to the left, three to the right, and four in a sweeping quarter-circle back to one.

  At bar twenty-five after a diminuendo, the tempo changed and she had to cue in the crimson armchair and the chest of drawers after the first beat of the bar, and then bring in the bookshelf and the trouser press, followed four bars later by the stuffed bear, the four-poster and Rodney’s Cousin Myrtl
e. And all the time she had to sing the tune in a breathless soprano.

  Playing away for all their worth, the whole room reached bar ninety-seven, and the first recitative: ‘Comfort Ye…’ Beating eight quavers to the bar with her right hand, Abby exhorted the bookshelf, Cousin Myrtle, the chest of drawers and the four-poster to play slowly and quietly by shaking her left hand, still as rigid as a Dutch doll’s, downwards, as though she were drying her nails. Glancing round she nodded to her dark green bathrobe hanging on the door who was standing in as the tenor.

  ‘Comfort ye, comfo-ort ye-ee, my pee-eeple,’ sang Abby, quelling Cousin Myrtle with a death-ray glance for coming in too early. As she speeded up the tempo to walking pace for ‘Every Valley,’ she must remember the bassoons, who dodged about all over the place throughout the aria. Nor did she think the stuffed bear was capable of counting thirty-one bars between twiddles, should she forget to cue him in, but somehow they circumnavigated every ‘rough place and crooked straight’, to end with a splendid run of trills from the crimson armchair.

  ‘Well done, everyone,’ called Abby. ‘Try and be even more together.’

  Only the stuffed bear and Cousin Myrtle were looking at her, but in her experience most musicians didn’t bother to look much at conductors.

  And now for the first chorus, with a ten-bar allegro tutti, before she stretched out both hands to the gold trees in the orchard outside, who were playing the part of the chorus.

  ‘And the glory, the glory of the Lord,’ sang the alto apple trees.

  ‘Terrific, wonderful,’ Abby urged them on. ‘Oh wow,’ she added as she cued in the plums, the, pears and an ancient quince tree, to bring in the basses, sopranos and tenors. It seemed right that such a pretty delicate tree as the pear should sing soprano.

  Oh thank God, it was all coming good.

  ‘And all flesh shall see it together,’ encouraged the apple trees.

  Abby worked on frenziedly until the light started fading. She was just about to embark on ‘A Trumpet Shall Sound’, which required a solo trumpet, when she noticed a candidate had rolled up in the form of Shosty who was back, mewing piteously, rubbing his fur against the window pane. She’d been so foul to him earlier. Putting down her baton, Abby opened the window. Leaping onto her shoulder, Shosty smelt of thyme and marjoram, he must have been hunting at the bottom of the mountain.