by Jilly Cooper
‘Good evening, Maestro,’ he raised her hand to his lips. ‘Don’t let them see how frightened you are,’ he whispered. ‘You look utterly sensational.’
Abby’s short hair was brushed straight back from a lily pale face. Her only make-up was eye-liner round the hypnotic eyes, which seemed to glow like tourmaline. The Maharishi effect was heightened by midnight-blue silk trousers and a long collarless matching jacket, which buttoned up to her neck. She wore no jewellery, the only note of frivolity was the diamanté buckles twinkling on her black suede pumps. In her pocket, warding off evil, was Rupert’s silver garlic.
‘They haven’t had a turn out like this since Pavarotti in Hyde Park,’ Rodney led her into the conductor’s room. ‘Oh, darling, I’m so proud.’
‘They’ve only come to see if I’ve got two heads,’ said Abby, as Mark Carling barged in.
‘You look wonderful, Maestro. What the hell are we going to do, Rodney? We’ve got about two hundred too many Press and nowhere to seat them.’
‘Put up a few fences,’ suggested Abby, through desperately chattering teeth, ‘that’s what they like sitting on best.’
She started to run through Oberon in her head, moving her hands to the music. Viking’s opening solo followed by the strings, then that spine-chilling shimmy downwards on the flutes, then blank. She simply couldn’t remember what came next.
In panic she turned to Rodney.
‘I guess I better use a score.’
‘Darling child, it’ll come back, relax.’ He shoved a glass of champagne into her hand. ‘Take the edge off your nerves.’
Next, they were interrupted by Howie, who’d nipped for a second out of Anthea’s dressing-room.
‘Good luck, kid, you look to die for.’
‘Sorry about the press conference.’
‘Forget it. Fact that you survived heartbreak and a suicide attempt creates public sympathy.’
‘Get out, Howie,’ said Rodney icily.
There was another knock. It was Hugo, sleek and glamorous in tails. He had sent two dozen red roses, ‘To the unbimbo’, at the Old Bell, which had made Abby laugh, now he said, ‘Are you ready, beautiful Maestro?’
Abby nodded, quite unable to speak.
‘Good luck.’ Hugo sauntered out onto the platform, fiddle aloft to great cheers. He was very popular.
‘Good luck.’ Marcus gave Abby a quick kiss. He was so nervous for her, he was going to stay outside in the park.
The auditorium was fuller than in Buenos Aires. Many of the audience and all the Press were poised for the public humiliation that so often accompanies a dramatic change of career.
For a second, Abby paused, panic stricken, on the edge of the platform, then turning she saw a smiling Rodney; his pink, bald head gleaming under the naked light bulb, as he blew her a kiss. Abby touched her silver garlic, then she was on her way, sweeping into the light, to an impassioned bellow of applause, which was taken up by the crowds in the park. She shook hands with Hugo.
‘Courage, mon amie.’
Then Abby forced herself to smile and bow to the audience, listening to the manic rattle of palm on palm which was so near in sound to a firing-squad.
‘Kerist, she’s gorgeous,’ said Blue.
‘Shades of Imran Khan,’ agreed Viking, ‘or something that Edwina Mountbatten wouldn’t have been able to resist.’
Abby noticed the Steel Elf, enchanting in black silk with her blond hair piled up, and then she looked up at Viking, who smiled at her, wonderfully confident. At her nod, he put his horn to his lips.
Abby gripped her stick, the upbeat rose and fell like a wand in fairyland, and as if by magic, the notes floated out from the midgy dark green depths of Oberon’s forest. Then she remembered nothing until an avalanche of applause crashed over her, bringing her back to earth.
Throughout the overture she had been completely in charge, yet able to become the music, her beautiful body undulating like seaweed in the dark blue silk. The orchestra, noticing the cruel scar on her left wrist every time she raised her arm, realized how important the evening was to her and had played as though their lives depended on it.
The Tchaikovsky was less successful. The mood was set by the First and Second Violins who had to rise and stand back, muttering ‘Bloody concerto’ as Abby’s rostrum was shoved forward, and the Steinway was wheeled onto the centre of the stage by the stage-hands in their dinner jackets.
Once the music-stands and chairs were rearranged, Hugo struck an A on the piano and the orchestra half-heartedly pretended to re-tune. They loathed concertos. Soloists stole the limelight and, particularly in the case of pianists, obscured half the orchestra, and made conditions even more cramped.
Most of them, however, found it difficult to keep a straight face, as Anthea swept onto the platform in a kingfisher blue-and-gold brocade dress, strewn with tassels that appeared to have been tugged off the sofa in her suite at the Old Bell. She then attacked the piano with the fury of a secretary who’d been asked to stay late and type a fifteen-page report on an old Remington whose ribbon had run out. The only drama was whether one of her large blue-veined breasts would fly out of her soft furnishings and whack the principal of the second violins in the eye.
‘That is the worst pianist I’ve ever heard,’ Abby shouted as she stormed back to the conductor’s room afterwards.
‘Hush darling.’ A very sheepish Rodney put his hand over her mouth. ‘Mea culpa, mea culpa, I must have been drunk or very tired when I hired her; probably both.’
‘She played the whole thing in boxing gloves.’ Furiously Abby tore Rodney’s hand away.
‘None of the audience will have noticed, and those who did will have marvelled at your restraint. Listen, they’re still clapping.’
Rodney handed her a glass of champagne.
‘I don’t want a drink, I need my wits for Heldenleben. Come in.’
It was a distraught Mark Carling.
‘Thank you Maestro, you were magnificent.’ Then, turning to Rodney, he groaned, ‘That soloist was dreadful, dreadful. How could we have booked her?’
‘You must have had a tip-off,’ said Rodney blandly, ‘and you know how the Arts Council love women. Anyway, she was called back five times; she can’t have been that bad.’
‘Only because they wanted to look down her dress,’ snapped Abby. ‘Anyone with binoculars could have seen her pubes.’
It is customary, even after the most terrible performance, for the management to visit a soloist and tell them they have been wonderful. Mark, a man of integrity, was in despair.
‘What can I say to her without perjuring myself, Rodney? Particularly with that creep Howie taping every word as evidence.’
‘Follow me,’ Rodney winked at Abby. ‘Back in a tick, darling heart.’
Hair dripping with sweat, aching all over, Abby was dying for a quick shower to clear her head before the Strauss, but curious, she lingered as Rodney flung open the door of Anthea’s dressing-room, then pausing in the doorway, opened his arms.
‘Anthea, my darling,’ he boomed, ‘magnificent is not the word.’
‘Very clever,’ muttered Mark in admiration, ‘must remember that one.’ Magnificent, he tapped it into his pocket computer, is not the word.
As Anthea was temporarily tied up with Rodney, Howie felt it safe to sidle out and pay court to Abby for a second.
He was going to have his work cut out at the party later. Anthea and Hermione would want his full-time attention, so would Abby, and after hearing Oberon, Howie was determined to sign up Viking, who was a really hot man. Probably straight but Howie wouldn’t mind getting his jaw broken finding out.
The audience were flowing back now. The piano had gone, and there was nothing to distract them from Abby and a vastly enlarged orchestra. The Tchaikovsky had done her no favours with the critics. She had forty minutes to redeem herself.
Everything was going wonderfully. Ein Heldenleben was drawing to a close. The woodwind had made horribly crab
by and discordant critics. The brass had been so loud and exuberant in the battlescenes they must have roused Strauss in his musicians’ heaven. The drums had thundered continuously. The four cymbals had clashed in perfect unison to mark the end of hostilities, and Don Juan’s horn call, the warrior returning from the wars in search of dalliance, had echoed joyfully through the park.
Abby’s hair was sopping, her face lurexed with sweat under the hot lights. She could see the shadow of her hands moving on the bare lectern. Somehow, she must hush the huge orchestra to make the pianissimo contrast of the love duet all the more touching. The cor anglais was now gracefully paddling like a swan. Throughout the piece, Abby had felt like a pilot, faced by a massive dashboard of dials and switches. Her aeroplane had survived the thunder and lightning of a great storm; she was now bringing its precious cargo of musicians safely in to land.
Then, as she cued in the horns, nothing happened. She tried again, nothing. She gasped in horror. Cramp gripped her right hand, which had never let her down in three years, totally immobilizing it. After a three-hour rehearsal this morning, then three-hours practising in front of the mirror, followed by all the tension of the performance, it had finally seized up.
For a few seconds, the orchestra cruised on automatic pilot. Realizing something was wrong, the cor anglais kept paddling, Hugo was poised to take over, when Abby grabbed her right elbow with her left hand, yanking it through the motions, one, two down, three to the left, short four and five back and six up to the centre, and one, two down, to re-establish the tempo.
The pain was so excruciating she thought she’d black out. But there was only one more discordant outburst from the orchestra to go as the weathercock shrieked, the wind howled, the enemies trumpeted, then the hero’s theme was back, with the horns, basses and cellos leaping nobly and majestically up the scale, and they were into the love duet.
On the big screens outside, the vast crowds could see Hugo’s sleek, dark head cocked to listen, and Viking never taking his narrowed eyes off Abby’s face, which was now shining with tears, as she cajoled them through the last few bars. And as suddenly as it had gripped her, the cramp melted away, soothed as much by the solo violin’s exquisite lullaby as by the unearthly beauty of Viking’s dark, tender reply.
Lifting both arms, she was back on course, bringing the great aeroplane down, down through the blue and landing without a bump on the runway. She felt so relieved, she almost forgot to bring in Carmine Jones and his trumpets to echo the hero’s theme fortissimo. Then a mighty crash from the wind and brass faded into the final peaceful, reassuring chord — the hero finally triumphant, bringing the H.P. Hall and the park outside yelling to their feet.
Marcus leant against the rough trunk of a big horse-chestnut tree, clutching himself; his debts, lack of recognition, loneliness, unrequited love, Rupert’s animosity, all totally forgotten. He had never heard anything so wonderful in his life, particularly as the gruesome butchering of the Tchaikovsky had nearly broken his heart. Oh darling, darling Abby, and darling St Cecilia or Polyhymnia, or Euterpe, or whoever guides the fortunes of musicians, prayed Marcus, make the same thing happen to me.
After the sixth call-back, Miss Priddock braved the stage with a huge bunch of red roses and, employing her old trick, an exhausted tearful, ecstatic Abby broke the cellophane with a stab of her baton, and handed a rose to Viking and one to Hugo who was near enough to kiss her.
The next time she returned with a beaming Rodney, who got a great roar of delighted recognition and immediately hushed the audience.
‘My lords, ladies, gentlemen, musicians, we have just heard a masterpiece about a hero overcoming his enemies, most beautifully played.’ He winked at his orchestra, triggering off a volley of ‘bravoes’.
‘But tonight we’re speaking about a heroine,’ he shushed more cheers, ‘who, in the last three years, has battled with dreadful pain, adversity, self-doubt, only to emerge tonight into a new career, as triumphant as she looks beautiful.’ One final time he raised his hand for quiet. ‘I am proud of the RSO, but the night is Abigail Rosen’s. Ladies and gentlemen, a star is reborn.’
TWENTY-THREE
As she fled back to her dressing-room, it was like the old days. People pressed themselves against the wall to let her pass, cheering her, others reached out to shake her hands, for others it was just enough to touch her for luck.
Howie was in raptures, fluttering round her, taking credit for everything. Anthea was a has-been, she didn’t even get the limo to take her back to London. Instead, it swept Abby on to a party at the sort of shabby grand house much featured in British mini-series before the stylist moves in. It belonged to Lord Leatherhead, the chairman of the orchestra.
‘Don’t get him on to bottled water, for God’s sake,’ Hugo had warned her. ‘He’s changed his family motto to “Springs Eternal”.’
As the limo clanked over a cattle-grid, Abby caught a glimpse of a llama and a couple of yaks blinking in the headlights.
Having insisted on showering and changing first, she had arrived so late that she was relieved to see Mr Nugent still there, plumey tail waving as he paid court to the house springer spaniels, who were more interested in finishing up abandoned plates of moussaka and spitting out the aubergine.
Howie was delighted that although Megagram had bankrolled the party, half the record producers in Europe seemed to have crashed it, climbing in through large Georgian windows or bribing the kitchen staff. He was less amused that half the agents in Europe had done the same thing, and were now circling Abby like jackals.
‘The fuckers, the fuckers, why didn’t Megagram put bouncers on the door? But they’re gonna have to fight to keep you, Tiger,’ he told Abby. ‘You stick with me, I’ll field any difficult questions.’
Orchestras aren’t generally invited to parties, being a large number to cater for, but tonight a representative selection of the glamorous and well-behaved had been allowed in to impress potential sponsors.
Old Henry, the oldest member of the orchestra, a rank-and-file fiddle player who could tell you whether Heifetz had started up bow or down bow in 1942, but hadn’t heard of Abby before yesterday, came over and kissed her hand.
‘It’s not often I know why I became a musician.’
Abby longed to talk to him, but he was immediately sent flying by Dame Edith Spink. Massive and monacled, with the solid waistless figure of a cooling tower, Edith promptly whipped the dark red carnation out of her dinner-jacket and presented it to Abby.
‘Bloody good show, particularly the Strauss. That Anthea needs her bottom spanking.’ Dame Edith looked as though she’d quite like to oblige. ‘But you kept your nerve; made the RSO play out of their boots, which I have to say they’ve grown much too big for. You must come and guest with my boys and girls at Cotchester. You were lucky to have Hugo. Heldenleben really sorts the leaders out from the leaders. That little squirt Lionel Fielding would have made the most ghastly cock-up.’
‘I love your work,’ stammered Abby. ‘We all OD’d on The Persuaders at college. I’d just adore to discuss conducting with you some time.’
‘Come to lunch,’ said Edith. Then proudly, almost shyly, as though she were drawing forward a boat by its splendid figure-head, she reached for the handsome, high-complexioned woman behind her. ‘Have you met my partner, Lady Baddingham?’
The Press were everywhere, snapping everyone, desperate for a new angle on Abby’s triumph.
‘Who’s the latest boyfriend?’ asked a subtly smiling journalist.
‘That has nothing to do with my conducting,’ said Abby haughtily. ‘My goal is for people to judge me as an artist, not a woman.’
‘Mm, of course,’ said the journalist, taking in Abby’s tight leather trousers, and clinging yellow body-stocking.
On cue, Anthea wiggled past, hotly pursued by Randy Hamilton.
‘Does Anthea feel the same?’
‘No-one could regard Anthea as an artist,’ snapped Abby.
Howie,
meanwhile, had buttonholed Viking.
‘I work twenty-four hours a day,’ he was saying. ‘I am married to my clients, but I could find a window in my schedule to buy you lunch. How about Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons next week?’
The Celtic Mafia were getting drunk.
‘That’s the most important agent in London, you’ve just told to piss off,’ Blue reproved Viking.
‘Time is fleeting,’ said Viking, holding out his glass to a waitress. ‘And artists’ agents very long winded. D’you think Rodney’s bonked Abigail?’
‘Aye,’ said Dixie. ‘She stopped at his place long enough.’
‘Who’s the boy with dark red hair? Pretty as a picture, never takes his eyes off her.’
‘That’s Marcus Campbell-Black,’ said the Steel Elf warmly. ‘He’s lovely looking.’
‘That explains it,’ said Dixie. ‘Must be picking up her bills.’
‘Not after this evening,’ said Viking.
The musical press, determined to refute Strauss’s unflattering portrait of critics, were falling over themselves to praise both Abby’s conducting and her newly reissued records, which they’d mostly slagged off in the past as being over-emotional and teetering on sentimentality.
Now, as they poured double cream over their chocolate roulade, they were bracketing her with Jacqueline du Pré, praising her passion, her lyricism, her wondrous lack of inhibition.
Furious to be out-cleavaged by Anthea, every valley should not be exalted, Hermione had tonight done up two buttons of her yellow Chanel suit. In her pocket, however, was a promising note from Rannaldini:
Carissima,
Our love was too important to be ruined by marriage. I needed another Kitty to run my life and free me to embrace you again.
Rannaldini was little Cosmo’s father, reflected Hermione, perhaps she should forgive him. Fortunately Abby hadn’t seen the Lynda Lee-Potter piece and, in a mood of euphoria, kissed Hermione on both cheeks, and allowed them both to be photographed arm in arm by Hello!.