The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous trc-4

by Jilly Cooper

  Taking a deep breath, Bob dialled Chloe’s number.

  ‘Rannaldini’s got his whores crossed,’ he told Boris. ‘Do you want to conduct the Verdi Requiem tonight? I’m afraid there’s no time for a rehearsal.’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘Yes, I will come. Thank you, Bob,’ said Boris, ‘but I ’ave no score, no car, no tailcoat. He is at dry cleaners. Chloe’s cat throw up on heem.’

  ‘I’m sending a car for you with the score in,’ said Bob, who knew Boris had been done for drink-driving and did not want to risk him getting lost, ‘and we’ll find you some tails. What size shirt are you?’

  ‘I look.’ Boris tugged the back of his collar round to the front. ‘Size sixteen. I thank you, Bob, from the beneath of my ’eart.’

  36

  Boris was too busy mugging up the score to feel really nervous until he saw the Albert Hall, enmeshed like Laccoon in the cables of the BBC television vans, and the vast crowds that had gathered without any hope of tickets just to get a glimpse of Harefield and Rannaldini arriving. Once in the conductor’s dressing room, he had great difficulty putting on the hired tails. When your hands are trembling frantically it is hard to get the studs through the starched shirt-front. He wished he could stiffen his upper lip accordingly. The white tie took even longer and was so white that his face and teeth looked yellow by comparison. He felt as if he were in a sauna and a straight-jacket already.

  ‘Need any help?’ Bob’s gleaming brown head came round the door.

  ‘Eef my hand shake this much when I get up there, we start prestissimo and the ’ole thing will be over een ten minutes,’ said Boris through chattering teeth, then blushing, ‘Is possible to let Rachel know?’

  ‘I rang her,’ said Bob. Then, thinking that at such a time white lies didn’t matter, ‘She sent her love and wished you luck.’

  ‘Her love, oh God, if I make a dick-up, what will she say, and how can I control Hermione?’

  ‘Hermione’s cried off,’ said Bob grimly.

  Despite his uncharacteristically enraged accusations that she was being utterly unprofessional and bloody wet, his wife had refused to go on.

  ‘Christ! Who sing eenstead?’

  ‘I thought, fuck it — so I rang Cecilia.’

  ‘Omigod!’ Boris went even paler. ‘I control her even less. She raise skirt in middle of other soloists’ arias to distract audience.’

  Bob laughed. ‘Tonight she’ll play ball. She’s got the perfect opportunity to upstage Rannaldini and Hermione. It’s me who’s going to end up out of a job and in the divorce courts.’

  The shadows under Bob’s eyes were as deeply etched as bison horns in cave paintings. The poor guy really has put his head on the block, thought Boris.

  It was a stiflingly hot evening. Ladies with fans ruffled the fringes of those beside them. The London Met were tuning up like birds in a wood. Microphones hung like spiders tossed out of a window. In the dress circle, stalls and red-curtained gold boxes, people chattered away excitedly in a score of different languages. The promenade area was overflowing, mostly with young men with beards and their girlfriends, bright eyed and rosy cheeked like younger sisters in Chekhov. Many of them held up RANNALDINI RULES OK and WE LOVE HERMIONE banners. Paper darts were sailing through the air. The BBC had threatened to cancel. Richard Baker, who was covering the prom for television, and Peter Barker, for the radio, were frantically rewriting their scripts, as Bob mounted the rostrum and dropped the bombshell that both Rannaldini and Hermione would not be appearing.

  With the storm of protest that broke over his head, it was a minute before he could announce that their places would be taken by Boris Levitsky, a young Russian composer and conductor, very well known in his own country, and by one of the greatest divas in the world, Cecilia Rannaldini.

  ‘So at least,’ Bob shouted over the uproar, ‘you needn’t fold up your Rannaldini banners.’

  The audience glared at him stonily and started to boo and catcall. Some of them had flown thousands of miles and threatened to demand their money back. Others walked out in noisy disgust.

  ‘I ’ate them,’ muttered Boris, waiting to go on.

  ‘They’ll hate themselves even more when they realize what they’ve missed,’ said Bob, combing Boris’s tangled pony-tail at the back, his calm exterior belying panic within. What if Boris really couldn’t cope? The Requiem was one of the most complex and demanding pieces of music. The chorus, sitting up against their crimson curtains, slumped in disgust. All the young sopranos and altos had been to the hairdressers and bought new black dresses. They might never get another chance to sing, or whatever, under the great Rannaldini.

  ‘O day of wrath, O day of calamity,’ sang the front-desk cellist who’d nearly lost his Strad in Rannaldini’s flat the day before. ‘Bob’ll get lynched if Boris cocks it up.’

  ‘Boris is a good boy,’ said his neighbour, opening the score they were sharing.

  ‘And virtually inexperienced in public.’

  ‘We’ll be OK as long as we don’t look up.’

  Larry Lockton was so enraged he had to rush to the bar for a quadruple whisky. In anticipation of massive popular demand, Catchitune had just put on a huge re-press of Harefield’s and Rannaldini’s legendary 1986 version.

  ‘The only thing that fucker can be relied on to do is to let one down. We’re leaving at the interval.’

  ‘There isn’t an interval,’ said Marigold, consulting her programme. ‘They keep going for ninety minutes without a break. Poor Boris. I wonder what’s happened to Hermione and Rannaldini.’

  ‘I hope it’s something serious,’ snarled Larry.

  It was bang on seven-thirty. Boris tried to keep still, take deep breaths and make his mind a blank, but the butterflies inside him had turned into wild geese flapping around.

  ‘Good luck,’ said Bob. ‘And may God go with you,’ he whispered.

  The promenaders scrambled to their feet. Boris fell up the stairs as he and the four soloists came on and had to be picked up by Monalisa Wilson, enormous and resplendent in flame-red chiffon.

  ‘I’m glad mega-Stalin is indisposed,’ she murmured to Boris. ‘He frightens the life out of me.’

  Reluctant laughter swept the hall as she brushed the dust off his knees in a motherly fashion and straightened his tie.

  ‘We show eem, we do better wizout him,’ whispered Cecilia, who looked stunning, but more suited to sing in a night-club in clinging gold sequins. The boy’s very attractive, she thought, and comparatively untouched by human hand.

  The biggest audience ever squeezed into the Albert Hall were bitterly disappointed, but they saw Boris’s deathly pallor and his youth and some of the cognoscenti remembered his defection from Russia. Goodwill began to trickle back.

  Standing on the rostrum, all Boris could see below the soaring organ pipes were rows and rows of men and women dressed in black — as if for his funeral. He saw the pearly skins of the drums and the gleaming brass who would play such a big part in the next ninety minutes. The bows of the string section were poised above their instruments.

  Boris looked at them all solemnly and searchingly. The notes of the score seemed to swim before his eyes — 278 pages of decision making and complexity. Bending his dark head he kissed the first page and with a totally steady hand gave the upbeat. The whispering nightingales of the ‘Kyrie eleison’ can seldom have been slower or more hushed. Alas, some gunman took off down Kensington Gore after a shoot-out and soon a convoy of police cars, sirens wailing sforzando and hurtling after him, could all be heard within the hall, destroying the mood of veneration and snapping Boris’s concentration.

  The first deafening crashes of the ‘Dies Irae’ were very ragged. Every hair of Boris’s black glossy head was drenched in sweat. The audience were beginning to exchange pained glances. Twice he lost his place, pages fluttering like a trapped butterfly, but like kindly trusty old Arthur with a nervous young rider, the London Met carried him until he found it ag
ain.

  His stick technique was ungainly. When emotion overwhelmed him, he slowed down dangerously. In the ‘Recordare Jesu Pie’ when Cecilia and Monalisa sang their first exquisite, divinely complementary duet together, their voices chasing each other in arrows of light like fireflies, he was so moved that he took his stick in both hands and began loudly to sing along with them, until he remembered where he was, and then had to wipe his eyes. But slowly both orchestra, chorus and packed crowd responded to his passion and terrifying intensity.

  Back in Paradise earlier in the evening, Lysander, sounding like Neptune at the bottom of the sea, had rung Georgie from his car.

  ‘I’ve really goofed this time,’ he said. ‘Rannaldini’s ducked out of the prom so Boris is going on in his place — Verdi’s Recreation or something. Rachel wanted to tape it on my machine, but it’s fucked and I was stupid enough to say I was coming to see you and before I knew it, Georgie, I said, why didn’t she come as well. I’m really sorry, I’ve screwed up Flora’s last night.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ Georgie stemmed the flow.

  ‘We’ll get a take-away. Rachel can have very dry vegetables,’ said Lysander, reeling in gratitude. ‘She’s seriously fierce, but basically if she’s watching Boris she won’t have too much time to bang on about unleaded pet-food.’

  Rachel was even fiercer. Overwhelmed with envy for Georgie’s lovely house, her replete, indolent beauty and the obvious adoration of Lysander, only curbed by Flora’s presence, she was driven into a frenzy of disapproval. She was also overcome with nerves for Boris, furious at having to watch him in front of strangers, ashamed how jealous she felt that he rather than she should be given this massive break.

  A quick drink on the terrace before the programme produced a storm of abuse because the overflow from Flora’s bath came splattering out on to the terrace and no-one did anything to save the water for the garden or even for washing the car. Trying to lighten things, Lysander said it was like Arthur peeing and then couldn’t stop laughing.

  Georgie, who was wearing an old sundress and a yellow chiffon scarf to hide yet more lovebites, was taken aback by how pretty Rachel was. Like one of those girls the upper fourth have crushes on at school, she carried understatement to an art form. Tonight her unmade-up eyes were hidden by big spectacles and, with loose black trousers and padded shoulders on her long black cardigan, you had no idea what shape she was, but could only think how marvellous she’d look with everything off.

  On the way into the drawing room and the television, Georgie made the mistake of showing her the new yellow-flowered paper in the dining room.

  ‘I wonder how many rain-forest trees were cut down to produce that,’ said Rachel coldly. ‘I prefer painted walls myself.’

  Nor were matters improved when Flora wandered in with a huge vodka and tonic and wearing one of Guy’s shirts with all the buttons done up to hide her lovebites from her mother, and promptly lit a cigarette.

  ‘You shouldn’t be smoking at your age,’ snapped Rachel.

  Having heard about Flora throwing up in Boris’s trumpet and remembering him saying how sexy and talented she was, she was not disposed to like her.

  ‘If I want to kill myself I should be allowed to,’ said Flora, kissing Lysander hallo.

  ‘It’s the harm you’re doing to everyone else’s lungs. Move dog,’ ordered Rachel, who wanted to sit on the sofa facing the television.

  Dinsdale growled ominously.

  ‘I’m afraid he won’t,’ said Georgie apologetically.

  ‘The fleas are terrible, Mum,’ said Flora slapping her ankles. ‘Like dew leaping on the lawn.’

  Very pointedly curling her long legs underneath her, Rachel sat in an armchair. Richard Baker was now telling viewers that Rannaldini and Hermione wouldn’t be appearing.

  ‘Why on earth d’you think Rannaldini cried off?’ asked Georgie, emptying the remains of a bottle of Muscadet into everyone’s glasses. Flora, who knew, couldn’t say anything.

  ‘Expect he had an offer he couldn’t refuse,’ remarked Rachel sourly. ‘Like some girl he hadn’t fucked before.’

  Once in flow, she went on about Rannaldini’s promiscuity.

  ‘He was always trying to get me into bed, and he’s had Chloe, Boris’s present incumbent.’

  Ultra-cool on the surface about Rannaldini, having enjoyed nearly a month in his company, Flora was now realizing how desperately she was going to miss him. Tired, and depressed that she hadn’t done any of her holiday work, she wondered how on earth she would put up with the restrictions of Bagley Hall; and now this stupid bitch wouldn’t stop slagging him off.

  Once the Requiem was under way, however, Rachel’s scorn was reserved for Boris. Why the hell was he wearing red braces? Why hadn’t he cleaned his nails? Look at his hair halfway down his back. That must be Chloe’s doing. Look how it was escaping from its pony-tail. Now he was taking things too fast, now much too slowly — he was so over-emotional — why the hell couldn’t he beat in time?

  ‘Why don’t you shut up and listen?’ muttered Flora.

  ‘Boris is conducting marvellously,’ said Lysander at the end of the ‘Dies Irae’, ‘but it’s a bit Inspector Morse for me.’ Kissing Georgie and seeing they were supplied with drinks, he slid off to Rutminster to get a take-away.

  ‘I’d no idea Cecilia had such a wonderful voice or was so beautiful,’ sighed Georgie.

  ‘Rannaldini bonks her every time she comes over,’ spat Rachel.

  I’ll kill her soon, thought Flora.

  ‘Oh, there’s Marigold,’ said Georgie as the camera roved over the audience. ‘Doesn’t she look gorgeous?’

  ‘Anyone can look gorgeous when they spend that kind of money on clothes,’ hissed Rachel, ‘and the way her megalomaniac husband floodlights his house every night — such a waste of energy.’

  She was panic-stricken that any minute the cameras would latch on to Chloe looking more blond and beautiful than anyone. There, dominating the screen, was the husband who had left her and who, after the performance, would go back to Chloe’s arms.

  The Requiem was drawing to a close. The television crew who’d come to mock were in ecstasies that a new star had been born. Boris had also been helped by Cordelia’s superb lighting, although he had to muddle through the ‘Agnus Dei’ and the ‘Sanctus’ almost in the dark.

  Arms stretched out like a young Christ, tears spilled out of his long dark eyes and poured down his wide, pale, tortured face, as he coaxed miracles out of orchestra, chorus and soloists. Even though they’d sung and played their hearts out for well over an hour without a break, both performers and audience wanted it to go on for ever.

  After the thunderclaps, the lightning and the soaring brass, Cecilia was singing again, divinely mewing, making up in dramatic effect whatever she lacked in beauty of tone. The whispering nightingales had returned, as like a priestess she intoned, pianissimo, twenty-nine quavers on the same middle C: ‘Lord deliver my soul from the doom of eternal death in the great day of judgement.’

  Then, against an ever-softening drum roll, the chorus joined in for the last two Delivera Mes and Boris, his stick like a scimitar, brought the work to a close. As the final brass sounded the last trump, the promenaders gathered themselves up like a great tiger. It seemed impossible that such a hush should be followed by such a deafening roar of applause as the entire audience, musicians, soloists and chorus rose from their seats shouting, screaming and cheering. The hall that had been so still was a churning sea of clapping hands. Richard Baker was so excited he could hardly get the words out.

  Then Boris, who seemed in a trance, broke down and sobbed like a wild animal until Monalisa Wilson pulled him comfortingly to her bosom and the bass lent him a red paisley handkerchief to dry his tears as the bravoes rang out.

  As he stumbled downstairs for the first time, Bob was waiting. His round, kind, ecstatic face told it all. ‘Didn’t you hear Giuseppi weeping with joy up in heaven? Oh, my dear boy,’ and they were in each ot
her’s arms, frantically clapping each other’s backs — but not for long, Boris was next being smothered in kisses. Cecilia only had time to wipe away her mascara before they were back on stage.

  Running on, with a mosaic of red lipstick down the side of his face, clapping all the time like an excited child, Boris shook hands repeatedly with each of the soloists, then brought the section leaders to their feet, with as many of the orchestra as he could reach. To mighty roars of applause and thunderous stampings of feet, he made the entire chorus stand up again and again. Then there were more cheers for the chorus master.

  But the applause was for him and when two huge bunches of yellow carnations and lilies arrived for Monalisa and Cecilia, everyone laughed and yelled approval when Cecilia promptly gave hers to Boris with a little curtsy.

  ‘What are you doing later?’ she murmured.

  ‘More, more, more,’ yelled the entire Albert Hall, stamping their feet.

  ‘Vot shall I play? I breeng no music. I no expect,’ said Boris.

  Bob smiled. ‘I took the precaution of getting copies run off of one of your songs.’

  So Boris mounted the rostrum once more with Cecilia’s flowers still under his arm and the hall fell silent.

  ‘I no spik good English,’ he said in a choked voice, ‘but I zank you all. I feel the good weel. She carry me. I will have zee orchestra play leetle composition of mine in style of Russian folk-songs. That grass is not more green on other side of fence.’

  Despite the orchestra and Cecilia sight-reading, the charm and haunting beauty of the little piece was indisputable and once more Boris was cheered to the rooftops and they were still applauding when Richard Baker regretfully bid goodbye to the viewers.

  ‘That was the most wonderful programme I’ve ever seen,’ said Georgie wiping her eyes. ‘You really missed something,’ she told Lysander as he came through the door weighed down with carrier bags.

  ‘I saw a bit in the chip shop,’ said Lysander. Then, turning to Rachel, ‘You must be so thrilled.’