Appassionata rc-5

by Jilly Cooper

  ‘Boris was a great conductor,’ mused Abby.

  ‘But not especially focused. He’s going out with some big boobed Bratislavian bassoonist tonight. So Marcus and I said we’d babysit.’

  ELEVEN

  ‘Don’t mention Rannaldini,’ muttered Flora as, clinking bottles in time to the clanking of the ancient lift, they slowly climbed to the sixth floor, ‘or Boris will foam at the mouth.’

  Boris was already foaming at the mouth. Hardly concealing his manhood with a Ninja Turtle face towel, he was waving a toothbrush instead of a baton. Having opened the front door, he dived into a nearby bathroom to spit out the toothpaste. He had just had a bath and was trying to dry a pair of boxer shorts with a hair-dryer.

  Despite a sallow skin, deep-set eyes almost entirely concealed by puffiness, dark hair like an unclipped poodle and a chunky, rugger player’s body, there was an undeniable Byronic smoulder about Boris.

  Abby took one look at him, realized she was half an inch taller, kicked off her shoes and bolted to the 100 to repair her smudged eyeliner and even put on some lipgloss.

  Boris took one look at Abby and decided to give the Bratislavian bassoonist a miss. He and Abby were soon gabbling in Russian about their Moscow days.

  ‘What have you got for us to drink?’ asked Flora.

  ‘I cannot drink, I am on vagon.’ Then Boris saw the bottles Flora was taking out of an Oddbins carrier bag, ‘Oh vell, perhaps I am not.’

  Abby was even unfazed by the messiest living-room ever. It was very Russian with crimson and scarlet furniture and gold icons on the midnight-blue walls, but every chair was piled high with clothes. The grand piano buckled under scores, covered in drink rings, and upended silver photograph frames. The dark red velvet cloth on the big table could hardly be seen for hamburger boxes and bottles wafting stale remnants of drink. On the bookshelves were half-eaten apples, overflowing ashtrays, tapes and CDs out of their cases.

  While the entire family obviously chucked their shoes and boots in one corner, the rest of the floor was littered with orange peel, pencil sharpenings, tissues and crumpled-up pieces of manuscript paper.

  ‘Oh Boris, you are a slut,’ sighed Flora. ‘Where are the children — hidden under the rubble?’

  ‘I forget to tell — the kids, they stay with friends.’

  ‘Good thing, they’ll get bubonic plague if they stay here.’

  Flora removed a curling ham sandwich from the mantelpiece.

  ‘When did you last eat?’

  ‘I verk since midnight last night,’ said Boris proudly. ‘Nearly twenty hours.’

  While Flora chided, Marcus, who was more practical, had found a black dustbin bag in the kitchen and now settled down to clear up the mess.

  ‘Where’s the stuff you’ve just written?’

  ‘I put it in the samovar for safety,’ said Boris.

  ‘Is it numbered?’ asked Marcus, retrieving it.

  ‘Not that it matters,’ Flora, who was opening bottles, murmured to Abby. ‘Play it back to front, upside-down, it wouldn’t make any difference.’ She blew a kiss at Boris.

  ‘Let me see,’ said Abby reverently.

  Marcus held out a manuscript page covered in a mass of black corrections.

  ‘Looks as though a lot of centipedes have been doing the Highland Fling after a mud bath,’ said Flora. ‘Why can’t you use a rubber instead of crossing out?’

  ‘Because eef my first thought was best, eef I rub it out, it is gone.’

  ‘How can anyone copy that?’ grumbled Flora.

  ‘I can,’ said Marcus, removing the pages to the safety of his music case.

  ‘Vot does eet sound like?’

  ‘I’ll try and play it later when I’ve tidied up this dump.’

  ‘What a wonderful wife you’ll make someone.’ Flora lobbed some orange peel at Marcus’s black bag and missed. ‘If you want to make yourself useful,’ she said to Abby, ‘go and wash up four glasses. Abby had a dazzling début as a conductor,’ she was telling Boris as Abby returned with an assortment of mugs, cups and even a small vase.

  ‘Ear is the only theeng that matter,’ said Boris, filling them all up to the top. ’Ear and rhythm, telling the orchestra how and ven to play. A conductor must learn what is possible to ask, then ask the orchestra ten times more. He must also come into a room at any time and command attention.’

  ‘“You have that in your countenance which I would fain call master,” or rather maestro,’ quoted Flora, settling down to sort out the mountain of newspapers thrown down by the fireplace.

  ‘What piece did you do?’ asked Boris.

  ‘Bartók’s Viola Concerto.’

  ‘Ah,’ Boris gave a theatrical sigh and drained his glass. ‘Bartók is like me. His last Christmas he could never leave hees flat because he was so ashamed he had no money to tip lift man.’

  ‘Bartók had security till he was eight, then his father died like mine did,’ said Abby, taking a huge gulp of red wine.

  ‘He was Aries like me,’ said Flora.

  ‘Like mine, his genius was never recognized.’ Boris was near to tears. ‘He die in poorness like I shall.’

  ‘If you gave up drink and worked a bit harder, you’d be very rich,’ said Flora, tipping a pile of Guardians into Marcus’s dustbin bag. ‘Oh look, here’s your hairbrush, that must have been missing for months.’

  Removing it from the pile, Flora sat down on the arm of Boris’s chair and started to brush his wild curls.

  ‘My music reflects the chaos of our times.’

  ‘I don’t know why you don’t save time and programme this flat instead.’

  Ignoring her, Boris topped up Abby’s glass. ‘I am sorry about your wrist. I have all your records. Vil you play again?’

  ‘My physio thinks so, but I still can’t grip the neck of a violin and my fingers can’t get around the strings.’

  ‘Eet is same, I ’ave music bursting to get out of my head, but I cannot write.’

  ‘It’s not the same at all,’ reproved Flora. ‘You can still move a pencil. Don’t be a drama queen.’

  ‘Ouch,’ said Boris, as she tugged at a tangle at the back. ‘What’s got into you?’

  ‘I am sick of an old passion. Christ, you’ve got chewing-gum here.’

  ‘I wanted to tell you, Boris.’ Lowering her voice Abby broke into Russian again, obviously talking about Rachel because soon they were both crying and wiping each other’s eyes and pouring out more glasses of red.

  ‘Summit meeting between the super powers,’ said Flora drily, as Marcus returned with a second dustbin bag.

  Beautiful red-and-blue patterned rugs were beginning to emerge on the floor and a gold-and-blue embroidered shawl on the piano where Marcus was righting the silver-framed photographs of the old days in Moscow: children on toboggans, grannies with swept-up hair, the young Boris with Prokofiev and Shostakovich.

  ‘That vas my Rachel,’ Boris pointed to a photograph of a beautiful but disapproving-looking woman. ‘She vas a saint.’

  ‘She was a crosspatch,’ said Flora, getting a black velvet toggle out of her trouser pocket to tie back Boris’s curls. Finally she brushed his wild eyebrows.

  ‘There, Mel Gibson.’ She kissed the tip of his nose.

  ‘How many voices are you scoring the Requiem for?’ asked Abby.

  ‘None,’ said Boris flatly. ‘The instruments play the voices. The RSO chorus is full of squawking amateurs and Hermione Harefield wanted to sing soprano part. So I stop them all. I ’ate singers.’

  Returning to the pile through which she was making slow progress because she kept stopping to read things, Flora was now brandishing an unstamped postcard with a charging bison on the back.

  ‘Why are you writing to Edith Spink?’

  ‘She send tape of concert of my Berlin Vall Symphony she did in Vest Country. It sound so ‘orrible, I write telling her never to play my vork again. I vondered vot happen to that postcard, geeve it to me.’

  ‘Don’t be si
lly,’ Flora tore up the postcard and chucked it into Marcus’s black bag. ‘Edith’s a good egg. When Rannaldini blocked my scholarship to the Academy, she put in a good word. You’re stupid to upset her, Boris, she’s on your side.’

  ‘Not ven she play my music like that. I shall have to go back to teaching.’

  ‘You can’t, you hated teaching,’ said Flora sensibly. ‘All those staff meetings about handles on lavatory doors, all the fuss when you wanted time off to go to performances, let alone rehearsals. And you can’t compose if you have to write lectures. You’ve got to finish, Rachel’s Requiem.’

  ‘I never meet a deadline or an honest woman,’ said Boris sulkily.

  ‘That’s bloody rude when I’ve given you the benefit of my advice. Christ,’ Flora pulled out a sheaf of brown envelopes, ‘don’t you ever pay bills?’

  ‘Not if I can’t pay them. I cannot buy my kids clothing, I cannot redecorate my flat. Look at the damp.’ Boris pointed to a dark stain above the window.

  ‘You’ll be able to paper it with brown envelopes,’ said Flora, ‘Here’s one from the Danish National Ballet — surely you don’t owe them any money?’

  Opening the envelope Flora triumphantly shook out a cheque for thirty thousand kroners which Boris held up to the light in ecstasy.

  ‘It’s for ballet they want me to write about Little Mermaid.’

  ‘That’s terrific,’ said Abby excitedly. ‘You’ll get repeats every time anyone wants to do it and they can sell videos and tapes in the foyer.’

  Boris, whose melancholy alternated with raging high spirits, became quite expansive at the prospect of relative riches. Normally he, Flora and Marcus would have played chamber music into the small hours but desisted in deference to Abby.

  ‘What are your plans?’ he asked her.

  ‘Take the course at the Academy. I’ve familiarized myself with loads of scores in Lucerne, now I need practise. I’ll take any gig offered.’

  Having tidied up as much of the sitting-room as possible, Marcus was wheezing so badly from the dust that he had to retreat to the kitchen, resort to a couple of puffs from his inhaler, and sit down for ten minutes, hunched over the kitchen table to recover his breath. Then he started on supper. There was only a certain amount of his day that he could cope with other people. He needed to be alone now to think about next week’s concert.

  Finding a lot of eggs of dubious antiquity, some rockhard Gruyère and some big tomatoes, he decided to make cheese omelettes and tomato salad. There was no vinegar so he used the juice of a wrinkled lime and brought a loaf out of retirement by turning it into garlic bread.

  Rubbing the Gruyère up and down the grater until the curls of cheese had overflowed the bowl, he studied the Chopin, humming and making notes.

  ‘Need a top-up?’ It was Abby with a bottle.

  Marcus shook his head.

  She looked much better than she had earlier. There was a sparkle in her eyes and colour in her cheeks.

  ‘My, that’s good,’ Abby pinched a bit of tomato out of the salad bowl. ‘Who taught you to cook?’

  ‘My stepmother.’

  ‘The divine Taggie,’ teased Abby. ‘Hermione Harefield said she wasn’t a woman of substance.’

  ‘She’s the most s-s-ubstantial person I know,’ stammered Marcus furiously. ‘She’s b-b-eautiful and k-kind and she’s the only woman who’s ever made my father happy. That bitch Hermione’s just jealous.’

  ‘I told you to keep your trap shut, Abby,’ said Flora, appearing in the doorway.

  After supper, leaving the others to drink and gossip, Marcus settled down to play the piano. Boris’s flat was on the second floor of a four-sided block which looked out on to a square of garden dominated by a huge golden catalpa.

  It was so mild that people in the surrounding flats opened their windows, wrapping their children in duvets, so they could all listen to Marcus until the stars came out, clapping and cheering whenever he stopped and shouting for him to go on.

  ‘Audience don’t do zat for me,’ grumbled Boris. ‘But he is good boy,’ he confided to Abby, ‘I teach him piano at school. Ven Rachel die he turn up at the house asking what he could do, looking after kids, helping me sort things out. He is gentle, but he is not at all vimp and he play like dream.’

  Abby, a bit drunk now, was equally enchanted but also tearful. She must not neglect her physio.

  Having dispatched the Grande Polonnaise with a great flourish, Marcus got out more music and launched into a modern piece, explosions of crashing notes, interspersed with a sad, haunting tune.

  ‘That’s beautiful,’ called out Abby. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Ees familiar.’ Boris looked perplexed.

  ‘Bloody well should be,’ said Marcus. ‘It’s part of the “Dies Irae” from Rachel’s Requiem. I finished transcribing it last night.’

  ‘I wrote that?’ Boris leapt to his feet. ‘Play it again. Where’s my violin?’

  ‘Under the sofa,’ said Flora.

  Impatiently Boris tuned up and began to play the main tune with Marcus accompanying. Marcus’s copying was dark and clear which made it very easy to read.

  Having Jewish blood like Abby, Boris tended to soup up the melody, playing very emotionally with great rhetorical gestures.

  ‘This is very grateful piece,’ he told Abby and Flora in delight.

  ‘You mean rewarding,’ corrected Flora. ‘Yes, it’s breathtaking. Like Bartók, “full of hitherto undreamed of possibilities”.’

  Occasionally stopping to change a note, totally absorbed, they played on.

  ‘Marcus is seriously good,’ Abby told Flora. ‘Nothing can stop him making it.’

  ‘Let’s make some coffee,’ Flora led Abby into the kitchen.

  ‘Marcus is happy and relaxed at the moment,’ she went on, ‘because he’s among friends and he’s had the odd drink but he’s crippled by nerves, throwing up for hours before concerts, and he’s already had to cancel two recitals because of asthma attacks, which doesn’t help in the music world, which hates unreliability.

  ‘Shall we wash up?’ Flora looked unenthusiastically at the supper plates.

  But, as the dish-washer was still working overtime, gurgling away cleaning all the silver and china they’d unearthed from the sitting-room, she decided to leave it.

  ‘Nothing ever gets clean that I wash by hand.’

  After some rootling around she found a tin of Gold Blend in the breadbin and, unable to find a spoon, shook some coffee into four cups.

  ‘Also,’ she added, switching on the kettle, ‘Marcus has a terrible hang-up about Rupert, who doesn’t see the point of him at all.’

  ‘But Rupert seemed so caring in BA,’ said Abby perplexed. ‘And when he visited me in the hospital.’

  ‘Rupert’s dazzling,’ agreed Flora, ‘but the brighter the moon, the darker the shadow it casts and it’s no fun being son of Superstud. Rupert’s always preferred Tabitha, Marcus’s younger sister, and he passionately disapproves of his son and heir taking up anything as drippy as the piano, when he should be at home learning how to run the estate.’

  ‘How did it turn out with those kids Rupert adopted?’

  ‘That’s the worst part,’ sighed Flora. ‘I’m afraid there’s no milk. Rupert’s totally besotted with the boy, Xavier, cured his squint and nearly his birthmark, got him racing round on Lysander’s old Shetland pony. Rupert’s got the tearaway he’s always wanted,’ Flora lowered her voice. ‘It’s crucified Marcus.’

  Returning to the living-room, Abby heard a voluptuous explosion of notes, and gave a cry of joy. Marcus was playing Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata.

  ‘It’s so darling, to play that — well — sort of in my honour.’ She went over to the piano.

  ‘Sort of,’ Marcus blushed, being a truthful boy. ‘Next week I’m also playing it in a recital at college.’

  ‘I’ll come along,’ said Abby in excitement, making Marcus blush even more darkly. ‘Did you know that to understand the Appa
ssionata, Beethoven said you have to read The Tempest?

  This music crept by me upon the waters,

  Allaying both their fury, and my passion,

  With its sweet air.’

  Marcus nodded. ‘My stepfather told me, and quoted the same lines. Sorry,’ as a flurry of wrong notes resulted, ‘I’m no good at talking and playing.’

  Abby retreated to the sofa.

  ‘God, my back aches,’ said Flora, who was plaiting Boris’s hair. ‘Three hours of Bartók takes it out of you.’

  ‘I’ve got some Ibuleve in the bathroom,’ said Boris.

  A smell of bonfires was still drifting in through the open window. Glancing at his watch Marcus saw it was nearly eleven o’clock. They were still clamouring for more in the flats outside. He’d better stop soon or the kids would never get to bed. He launched into Roger Quilter’s Children’s Overture.

  ‘There was a lady loved a swine,’ sang Flora, as she returned with the Ibuleve.

  That’s a stunning voice, too, thought Abby in envy. Goodness they were a talented trio!

  Flora slumped between Boris’s knees, calmly pulling off her daisy-embroidered T-shirt and using it to cover high, pointed breasts, as Boris began to rub the gel into her shoulders.

  And I wonder what their relationship is, thought Abby.

  Glancing across the room as he launched into ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’ Marcus met Abby’s eyes, saw the admiration in them and thought how lovely she looked, her strong, proud face softened by the lamplight. She was much more boyish than he’d expected. Sitting on the sofa, her long legs tucked underneath her, she looked like a model for Gentleman’s Quarterly.

  Marcus’s timidity with women had been exacerbated two years ago at the stag-party of Basil Baddington, one of his father’s wilder cronies. Rupert, irked by Marcus’s apparent lack of interest in girls (after all, he was supposed to produce an heir one day), had organized a hooker.

  Marcus had been quite unable to get it up and had been violently sick. Terror, which makes people take deeper breaths, triggered off a violent asthma attack, which could have been fatal. The whole thing was hushed up by Rupert’s GP, the admirably unflappable James Benson, who got Marcus onto a nebulizer at the local hospital just in time.