Choral Society

by Prue Leith

  Finally, when only the younger guests were still with her, she hit the stop button.

  Lucy had flopped down a few minutes before and was still panting.

  ‘Rebecca, you’re a miracle,’ she said between gasps. ‘That was great.’

  ‘Yes,’ Joanna added, ‘I should hire you as an entertainment director, to lead fun and frolics for the guests.’

  Rebecca felt a rush of pleasure. Those two were so often disapproving that having them united in praise was like champagne.

  But she had begun to feel a touch guilty about Nelson, thinking she might have behaved a little crudely. Nelson hadn’t reappeared and so presumably hadn’t eaten either. So when they returned to the hotel, she went in search of him with a plate of grilled squid and salad. She found him in the music room, sorting through some sheet music.

  ‘Hi,’ she said.

  ‘Hi,’ he replied without looking up.

  She sat on the piano stool and looked up at him.

  ‘I’m sorry, Nelson.’

  He took no notice, so she reached over and put the plate of squid on the desk. ‘I brought you some lunch.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He glanced at the plate but not at her.

  ‘Nelson … On the beach before lunch … I was just trying to provoke you.’

  ‘Well, you succeeded.’

  ‘And I guess I wanted to hit back at you.’

  For the first time he looked up at her. ‘Hit back at me?’ he asked mildly. ‘Why, for God’s sake? What have I done?’

  Rebecca knew she’d feel petty complaining of him taking her grown-up daughter to a concert, but it still rankled. And thinking of it revived the hurt. She said, ‘Oh, Nelson, you know. Two can play that game.’

  ‘What game, for Chrissake?’ Annoyance and confusion was beginning to darken his face.

  ‘Don’t tell me you weren’t trying to punish me by dating my daughter!’

  Nelson’s faced changed from irritated puzzlement to comprehension and resignation. ‘I wasn’t “dating” your daughter! I took her to a concert! She’s a sweet girl. And genuinely interested in music.’

  That hurt a bit. Nelson had known her long enough to have discovered that Rebecca’s enthusiasm for culture was more about impressing people than genuine interest.

  ‘So, it was her mind you were after, was it, or furthering her education!’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Rebecca, it was hardly a candlelit supper in a nightclub! I didn’t tell you because I haven’t seen you.’ He shook his head almost imperceptibly and said, his voice much quieter, ‘God, Rebecca, you are such an idiot.’

  Suddenly that was exactly what Rebecca felt. An idiot.

  ‘I know.’

  He said, more gently, ‘Becca, we haven’t been together for months. You probably have half a dozen guys desperate to get in the sack with you. You don’t have any claim on me, and I don’t have any on you.’

  Rebecca nodded without speaking.

  ‘So you shouldn’t mind if I go to a concert with Angelica,’ he went on. ‘You can set your mind at rest about my intentions too. I don’t want to seduce her, OK? And if you want to make an exhibition of yourself on the beach, you have every right to. I don’t know why I let it get to me.’

  Rebecca frowned. ‘But that’s just it. I wanted to see if it would get to you.’

  ‘Why? Isn’t turning Orlando on enough? Or do you have to have an audience?’

  ‘Not any audience. You.’ She looked directly at him. Rebecca did feel genuinely contrite but at the same time she knew that she looked appealing: she was sitting on the piano stool below him, and with her head tilted back her face would be unlined. She could feel her eyes filling with tears, which would make them big and shiny. She said in a small voice, ‘I suppose I want you to still desire me.’

  It worked. He came over and put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Well, I do. But the problem is that you want everyone to desire you.’

  A big tear ran over her lid and down her cheek. Nelson rubbed it out with a thumb.

  Rebecca, content now, stood up and kissed his cheek – a soft, friendly, sexless kiss. ‘You are an angel,’ she said, ‘and I am a bitch.’

  ‘No, I am a fool, and you are a tart.’ He smiled to take the sting out of the remark. He had a great smile, his flawless teeth bright white against his handsome face.

  ‘Shall I get us a glass of wine, and you can eat this on the terrace?’

  But he had to sort the music for his class tomorrow and for the Messiah rehearsal, and said no.

  The next Saturday, as Rebecca was standing in the drive trying to decide on what to replace the horrible crazy paving on the terrace with, six young lads arrived in a couple of Range Rovers, their roof racks thick with surfboards.

  They were expected. They had just left school. ‘Eton or Harrow, I think,’ Joanna had said, ‘and one of them, Sebastian, has turned nineteen and his daddy’s birthday present is a two-week holiday for him and five of his mates. The boys are coming here for a week to learn to sail.’

  Rebecca had shaken her head in disbelief. ‘Five of them! Daddy must be rich as Croesus.’

  Rebecca watched them as they clambered out. They were gloriously good-looking, unselfconscious and confident. Their voices were deep as only very young men’s are. They hauled out rucksacks and squashy sports bags and flung them on the gravel with an animal energy overlaid with teenage indolence. God, thought Rebecca, youth is glorious. All of them, even the plainest, is edible.

  She wandered over.

  ‘Hello, one of you must be the famous Sebastian?’

  A tall, skinny boy with dark, spiky hair and an olive complexion put out his hand.

  ‘I’m Sebastian.’ He had an angelic smile. ‘But why famous?’

  She shook hands with him and then with the others.

  ‘Because we’ve heard all about your two-week birthday celebrations – the week’s surfing at Polzeath and of course the sailing week here.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Well, yes, we’ve just done the surfing bit. It was amazing.’

  ‘And,’ she teased him, ‘we know about the weekend partying on the beach at Rock.’

  He looked immediately embarrassed, and one of the others said, ‘Who told you about that?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘No tales of your misdeeds have reached Pencarrick. All we knew is that you were going to Polzeath. I’m guessing the rest, since beach parties at Rock are famous, or infamous, round here. And you’re only young once, right?’

  As she watched them shuffle through the front door Rebecca was smiling, thinking that a bit of lively youth might leaven the dough of middle-aged respectability which tended to pervade the place.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Orlando had been at Pencarrick for a week and Lucy had to admit he’d been entirely charming to everyone, had run his classes professionally and with good humour and had even managed, by being nice to the chef, to make the hotel dinners rather more exciting and modern.

  One morning, when his students had gone off to a local farmers’ market with the chef, he had sidled into her class. ‘Can I sit and listen, Luce?’ he asked. Lucy wanted to say no, and don’t call me Luce. She feared his glamorous presence would distract the students and his need for attention would not let him sit quietly. But she could hardly refuse, and she also relished the chance to show him just how good she was.

  ‘Sure,’ she said, indicating an empty chair. ‘We’ve been looking at writing styles, reading passages from Elizabeth David and MFK Fisher.’

  Briskly, to prevent any intervention or joking from Orlando, she addressed the class.

  ‘So, as we’ve seen, if you want the reader to see and smell and taste the food, to make them salivate, get them out of the armchair and into the kitchen, it is no good saying something is delicious. Or wonderful. Or cool. Or amazing. “Wow” won’t do either. These words are meaningless. You have to tell them how it actually smells or feels or tastes.’

  This was a direct dig
at Orlando. But he showed no sign of having made the connection, and watched her attentively.

  She got the students to shut their eyes, and imagine they were holding a jam doughnut as they described the sandy dryness of the sugar coating, the tender but resilient texture, the shock of the warm squirt of strawberry jam …

  For the next hour, they wrote descriptions of burnt toast, live lobsters, cinnamon Danish, boiling marmalade and much else. She was surprised to see Orlando beg some paper from his neighbour, and bend his head to the task. They brought their work to Lucy for comment as they finished it.

  At noon the students and Orlando hurried out for an hour on the beach before lunch, and Lucy collected up the pieces of work she had not yet read, and took them up to her room. She’d been intrigued and unwillingly impressed by Orlando’s description of boiling marmalade as it went from ‘roiling bubble to slow heave, with occasional small spitting volcanoes’. So she flipped through the papers looking for his looping Orlando on the top of the page. There was no description of toast or lobsters. Just the words,

  ‘Wow! Wonderful! Amazing! Cool! What a teacher!’

  On Sunday, Lucy went with Rebecca and Joanna for a day of loafing about and self-indulgence (Rebecca called it pampering) in a spa. It was Rebecca’s birthday, and last night there had been a dinner for her with a cake and lots of little presents. But Rebecca, never one, thought Lucy, to forgo an excuse for a junket, had insisted.

  Lucy went unwillingly. She had been going to have lunch with Joshua and had been looking forward to it. She was also opposed to the waste of money, ‘Three hundred and eighty pounds!’ she gasped, ‘Becca, you are off your head.’

  ‘No I am not! You’re a food writer. You should know gastronomy doesn’t come cheap. And nor does expert hairdressing, massage and the rest.’

  Lucy had another objection too, but didn’t feel she could voice it. She had never spent a day, or indeed an hour, in a spa, thought only feather-brained women patronised them and was embarrassed at the prospect of joining their ranks.

  ‘You’d be better off taking Orlando,’ she said. ‘He’d probably love being primped and preened.’

  ‘But it’s supposed to be a girls’ day out.’ Rebecca had looked at her oddly and added, ‘What is it with you and Orlando, Lucy? Why so dismissive of him? You can’t still be smarting over his getting the Globe job?’

  Lucy had shaken her head and Rebecca, for once tactful, had dropped the subject.

  Lucy did not want to miss lunch with Josh. And she was reluctant to admit to spending time and heaps of money on such nonsense. But she seldom lied, so she told him the truth.

  ‘I’m really sorry Josh, I’m going to hate it I know, but Rebecca is all excitement and Joanna thinks it would be a good team-building opportunity or some rot like that. And I hate to be the party-pooper.’

  Joshua had said, ‘Of course you must go! It’s just what you need. You are way too serious, Lucy!’

  ‘But at our age! Rebecca has booked us in for every weird treatment with mud and hot stones and mumbo jumbo and it’s all complete codswallop. I’m hardly going to walk out of there wrinkle-free and lithe as a dancer, now am I?The beauty business is in a brilliant conspiracy with the customer: she pretends it works so she can lie on a lounger and feel nice, and the business pretends it works because it makes money.’

  Josh had kissed her lightly on the cheek. ‘As I said, way too serious. Don’t think about it. Just enjoy it. Join the conspiracy.’

  As they set off in Joanna’s Audi A8, Joanna questioned Rebecca. ‘How did you swing a booking? Halcyon Days is full months in advance.’

  ‘Easy,’ replied Rebecca, sounding pleased as punch with herself. ‘I insisted on talking to Armand Boucher himself – I’m good at getting past receptionists and PAs – and I said I was bringing Lucy Barnes because she’s writing about Cornish spas with great restaurants. And of course he’s a huge fan and could not believe his luck, so he waved his wand, or wooden spoon or whatever. And found us a table. And we’re getting free treatments. Not all of them but …’

  Lucy, sitting in the passenger seat next to Joanna, swung round. ‘You what? Rebecca, you didn’t …’

  ‘Sure I did. What’s the point of being connected if you don’t use your connections?’

  Joanna chimed in. ‘Becca, you should have at least asked Lucy if you—’

  Lucy interrupted. ‘For God’s sake, Rebecca, how could you … It would … I cannot …’ She was spluttering and could not explain that she would never ever use her position to get something for free – it would compromise her integrity. She started again: ‘We absolutely cannot accept anything free …’

  ‘Oh, Lucy darling,’ said Rebecca, ‘don’t be so pompous. He’s not giving you a brown envelope stuffed with cash. He’s just thrilled to have you in his spa. Anyway, I thought all journalists lived on freebies.’

  There was some truth in that, Lucy had to admit. ‘Some do. I don’t. Sure, I’ve had dinner with restaurateur friends for nothing, but never, ever if I’m writing about them. And as for pretending I’m going to do a piece when I’m not … Rebecca, surely you see …’

  Rebecca shrugged and did not reply. Lucy faced front again, thinking crossly that Rebecca really was impossible. She had absolutely no sense of what was acceptable and what wasn’t.

  As they drove on and Lucy calmed down, she began to feel a little sorry for Rebecca. She had been so delighted with her coup. And when she leant forward and patted Lucy’s arm to say, ‘Look Lucy, I’m sorry, but it’s not a big deal, surely? You could one day do a piece on Cornish spas, couldn’t you? If you mind so much about a little white lie, you could make it true. Couldn’t you?’ Lucy found herself laughing.

  ‘I guess I could. And it’s true people blag their way into restaurants all the time, and anyway Armand would never notice, or care, if I wrote anything or not. He gets more publicity than the Royals. But no free massages, OK?’

  Joanna was worried about leaving the hotel for a whole day, especially on a Sunday which was ‘turnaround’ day at Pencarrick, when usually one lot of guests checked out in the morning and the next checked in in the afternoon.

  ‘But,’ said Lucy, ‘your staff are surely up to running the place without you? They have to when you disappear up north, don’t they?’

  Rebecca chimed in, ‘And besides, half the new arrivals – the sailing lads – are checked in already.’

  ‘It’s them I’m worried about,’ retorted Joanna. ‘Who knows what they’ll get up to?’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ said Lucy, ‘you can’t be their nanny. Just take their money and charge Daddy later if they trash the place.’

  Lucy didn’t think Joanna would have come at all if she had not remembered that this was tax-deductible research: how else would she know what the competition was like when she turned Pencarrick into a rich man’s, or rather rich woman’s, retreat?

  The three women had set off early with the idea of getting maximum value out of their ‘Premier Pamper Package’, but also because Rebecca and Lucy agreed that if they’d left any later the guests would have started checking out and Joanna would have got involved.

  Lucy found Joanna’s attention to detail both admirable and maddening. She worried about the smallest details when she could have surely got someone else to do it. Like sorting out Mrs Hall, who had a strange preference for instant coffee, and Mr Armitage, an insurance salesman whose bottom had been scalded by his towel rail. The fact that soon Pencarrick would be much too smart to have heard of Nescafé, and would have gleaming wet-rooms with underfloor heating, rain-dance showers and expensive bath bubbles – all way beyond the aspirations of Mr Armitage and his mousy little wife – did not affect her dedication to getting things right. She’s a considerable woman, thought Lucy, part control-freak and part obsessive. Last week she’d sent back a month’s supply of loo paper, because it was buff, not white. Mad. Perhaps all successful businesspeople are like that? And maybe that’s why I’d be so hopele
ss at it. I don’t want to control anyone, and I don’t worry about the detail either.

  It was a glorious morning. Lucy thought that Josh, who planned to spend the day walking, with a stop in the pub (the one she was to have joined him in) for lunch, had the right idea. Bound to be a lot healthier than a day in an air-conditioned treatment room. Josh was forever extolling the loveliness of the coastal walks and he knew them all. But although she liked strolling while talking peaceably, looking at the view and smelling the sea air, Lucy disliked the kind of exercise that made you hot and sweaty.

  So when Joanna’s right knee stiffened up with the driving and they stopped to let Lucy take over, she was dismayed to hear Rebecca saying, ‘Hey, what do you say we go for a walk up that little path? The sea must be the other side. It looks so …’

  Lucy looked at what seemed like a near vertical path, with rocky steps climbing out of sight. ‘Becca, Joanna just stopped driving because her knees are giving her grief – and you want to go mountaineering! Have a heart.’

  ‘No, that’s fine. It’s sitting in one position that hurts, not walking. But why the change of heart, Becca? This morning you were champing to get there early …’

  Rebecca nodded cheerfully. ‘True,’ she said. ‘I’m nothing if not inconsistent. And right now I’d rather be out in this heavenly weather. And anyway, we’re early.’ She looked childishly excited and ran ahead. Sometimes, thought Lucy, I think Rebecca is twenty years younger than us.