Appassionata

THIRTY-FIVE

The first rehearsal of Rachel’s Requiem took place on the afternoon of the RSO’s first day back at work. Expecting to be bored rigid, the musicians trailed in weighed down by sweets, knitting, magazines, even computer games.

‘Ay’d take a good book,’ advised Miss Parrott.

‘I’d take a library,’ said Viking, who had had his front tooth put back, but was secretly incensed that ‘Rachel’s Lament’ had been given to the cor anglais. Carmine was livid that his wife was going to play it and would be around spying on him his first week back.

Simon Painshaw and Peter Plumpton were also livid they hadn’t been given the big solo as promised. Eldred had also been promised it, but was too upset to mind. His wife hadn’t come back, and after four and a half weeks’ respite, he would have to endure Hilary’s scorn and sighs once more.

Francis the Good Loser was also fed up. He had mislaid the cup of coffee and the doughnut he’d bought at the buffet, which in fact had been nicked by the First Bassoon, known as ‘Jerry the Joker’, who was now sitting innocently at his desk.

‘Heard the latest viola joke?’ he said to Steve, the union rep, who was his Second Bassoon. ‘If you’re driving down a hill and your brakes fail, who d’you hit, a viola player or a conductor?’

‘Dunno,’ said Steve.

‘The conductor,’ said Jerry. ‘Business before pleasure.’

‘Too right,’ said Steve, as Abby marched in looking tight-lipped and embattled.

Immediately, like a great aviary, the RSO launched into a frenzy of tuning up. Determined to stand no nonsense, Abby asked the eternally good-natured Charlton Handsome to move the horns upstage.

‘Excuse me, Maestro,’ drawled Viking, ‘is that a good idea?’

‘Why not?’ said Abby irritably.

‘If we’re too far away, you won’t be able to follow us.’

Abby’s explosion was averted by the librarian running in. ‘Here are the parts for the cor anglais and the piccolo, we’ll have the rest of the woodwind parts by the break.’

‘Why bother?’ said Hilary nastily.

Shooting her a withering glance, Abby opened the score. She was relieved that Boris was still too angry with Viking to show up. She could have done with his support, but composers tended to shoot themselves at first rehearsals, because their music, sight-read, sounded so terrible.

‘Quiet please.’ Abby looked round at the orchestra, spread out like enemy snipers in the forest. Even Miss Parrott’s harp reared up like a chess-castle waiting to whizz across the board and take her.

Abby took a deep breath.

‘We are about to play the most beautiful piece of music probably of the entire twentieth century. It is a requiem written in memory of Boris’s young, incredibly talented wife, who committed suicide.’

‘Lucky Boris — what was his secret?’ sneered Carmine Jones.

Cathie Jones, who’d gone white as she digested the importance and extreme complexity of her solo, now flushed scarlet with mortification.

‘You basstard, Carmine.’ Blue was on his feet — only Cathie’s anguished, terrified glance stopped him hitting Carmine across the stage.

‘Whose incredibly talented wife committed suicide in 1991,’ repeated Abby firmly.

‘You must have identified with that,’ simpered Hilary.

‘Don’t be a bitch,’ called out Flora. ‘This is a masterpiece.’

Rank-and-file viola players were not supposed to express opinions. Flora was getting much too uppity. Hilary scowled at her.

‘Tell us about your famous mother, Flawless,’ said Dixie, putting down his tax returns.

‘Why isn’t Boris conducting this?’ grumbled Juno.

‘We used to have Schnapps-breaks every half-hour,’ said Nellie wistfully. ‘D’you remember the time he gave us miniatures of brandy before we recorded Mahler One, and we got through it in an hour with no retakes.’

‘I loved Boris,’ sighed Juno.

‘You’ll have to put up with me,’ snapped Abby. ‘Give us an A, Simon, let’s get started.’

After a month off, the orchestra were very rusty, fingers and lips couldn’t be trusted. Effing and blinding under their breath they began ploughing through the ‘Dies Irae’. Jerry the Joker played ‘God Save the Queen’ on his bassoon to see if Abby noticed.

‘I heard you, get out, Jerry,’ she shouted. ‘As a section leader you’re supposed to set a good example.’

‘What a frightful piece of music this is,’ sighed Dixie.

‘Cheer up,’ said Jerry, going out grinning and licking doughnut sugar off his fingers. ‘You’ll only have to play it once.’

‘We’re recording it,’ Abby, who was battling for at least four performances as well, yelled after him. ‘But not till the middle of October to give you the time to digest the complexities.’

‘And puke them all up again,’ called out Randy.

Abby tried another tack.

‘You’ve got to familiarize yourself with it to love it,’ she pleaded. ‘In 1915, when they first rehearsed Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite-’

The orchestra raised their eyes to heaven and started to yawn ostentatiously.

‘Scythian Suite,’ persisted Abby, ‘one of the cellists said to the conductor: “Just because I have a wife who is sick and three kids to support, why must I be forced to endure such hell?” Musicians have always resisted innovation, if you know what I mean.’

‘That’s the trouble,’ said Carmine rudely, ‘none of us know what you do mean.’

‘Musicians don’t want to be lectured,’ said Davie Buckle, starting another game of patience on top of his drums. ‘They want to play the concert, then go out, get pissed and have a curry.’

The orchestra fell about.

It was time for Cathie to play ‘Rachel’s Lament’ for the first time, initially just as an extended echo in the ‘Lachrymosa’, then leading up to the long final solo in the ‘Libera Me’.

Surely they must realize how beautiful it is, prayed Abby. But Cathie was so nervous, so exhausted at the end of the school holidays, and so conscious of Carmine’s angry little red brake-light eyes boring into her, that she made a complete hash of it.

‘Gee, you screwed up on that one,’ said Abby in disappointment after the third botched attempt and leapt down to talk to Cathie. If she fluffed the “Lachrymosa” how the hell was she going to cope with the “Libera Me”.

‘I thought Boris was giving the big solo to Viking,’ whispered Dixie.

‘Boris has changed his total lack of tune,’ whispered back Randy. ‘Evidently Boris is knocking off his au pair and Viking’s nicked her, but only after Viking caught Boris in flagrante with-’ a wicked smile spread over Randy’s face, as he lowered his voice even more.

‘You gotta be joking,’ Dixie looked at Abby, his eyes on stalks. Then, immediately turning to his Second Trombone, ‘Did you know that Boris is bonking-’

Soon the story was whizzing around the orchestra, like starlings alighting on different trees at dusk.

‘What are you reading, Flawless?’ asked Viking.

‘“Sohrab and Rustram”,’ snapped Flora, who hadn’t forgiven Viking. ‘It’s about much more heroic men than you lot.’

‘Someone should write a poem called “So Bad on Rostrum”.’

‘That’s not funny, if you hadn’t jumped on Astrid, you’d be playing that solo.’

As they struggled for another ten minutes, Abby felt utterly superfluous, the orchestra were far too busy sight-reading to look at her.

‘Where the fuck are we?’ Viking asked Blue, as resounding crashes, twangs and shrieks rent the air.

‘Two bars to go. I’ll bring you in-’

Abby called a halt. ‘That was terrible.’

‘It would help if you beat a little more clearly,’ called out Juno.

Abby ignored her.

‘The next bit is really sad,’ Abby attempted a weak joke. ‘Could you play it, I guess, as Lionel looks?’

Lionel was furious. Confronted by a series of glissandos and teeth-gritting shrieks achieved by drawing the side of the bow down the strings, he pretended to cry.

‘I cannot bear it,’ he said, putting his head carefully in his hands so as not to disturb the lustrous blow-dried waves. ‘My string players have dedicated their lives to producing a beautiful sound-’

Abby raised an eyebrow.

‘And they are forced to make fools of themselves playing this junk.’

Lionel was acting up because over the page he had discovered the long solo Boris had deliberately made difficult for him, which was only accompanied by the basses. Compelled to tackle it, he pretended to be fooling around and deliberately making the most ghastly cock up.

‘You’re not trying,’ raged Abby, beyond any awareness that it was below the belt to bawl out a leader in front of his orchestra.

The RSO brightened at the prospect of a screaming match.

‘It’s unplayable,’ said Lionel flatly.

‘Don’t be such a goddamn wimp.’

‘You only say that, Maestro,’ furiously Hilary leapt to the defence of her beloved, ‘because there’s no way you could ever play it.’

Putting down the Selected Poems of Matthew Arnold, Flora said calmly, ‘Boris used to play the violin in an orchestra. He’s perfectly aware of its limitations and capabilities.’

‘You hold your tongue, young lady,’ said Hilary furiously.

‘It’s impossible, unplayable junk,’ intoned Lionel.

‘It is not,’ screamed Abby.

‘It fucking well is.’

‘Fucking isn’t.’ Jibbering with rage, Abby leapt from the rostrum, snatched Lionel’s fiddle and played the solo absolutely perfectly.

There was a stunned, stunned silence — long enough to play a Bruckner symphony. The musicians looked at Abby in amazement, but not in nearly as much amazement as Abby looked at Lionel’s violin. As she handed it back, Flora, roused out of her habitual cool, rushed forward, sending a music-stand and its music flying.

‘Oh Abby,’ she said in a choked voice. ‘Don’t you realize what this means? It’s come back, you can play again. Oh Abby.’

And the whole orchestra, except Lionel, Hilary, Juno and Carmine, stood up and cheered.

Abby looked utterly shell-shocked.

‘Thank you, everyone. That’s it for today; we’ll start with the Brahms Violin Concerto first thing after lunch tomorrow,’ she said, ending the rehearsal twenty minutes early and emerging from the dark inferno of Boris Levitsky into the sunshine.

Flora brought a couple of bottles of Muscadet back to Woodbine Cottage, and she and Abby celebrated with Marcus. Abby was still shell-shocked.

‘I cannot believe it, I’m sure it was a fluke. Did it really sound OK?’ she begged Flora over and over again.

‘Course it did,’ said Flora. ‘And that miraculous blood-curdling wonderful sound couldn’t have come from anyone else.’

‘Play something now,’ pleaded Marcus, picking up Abby’s coat and hanging it up in the hall, ‘just to convince yourself. I want to hear it, too.’

‘I daren’t, not yet. I don’t want to tempt providence and I don’t want any more to drink,’ Abby put her hand over her glass. ‘I gotta work.’

‘I don’t know why you bother,’ grumbled Flora, topping up her own glass, ‘after the way those pigs treat you. Just walk out and go back to reducing the whole world to orgasm on the violin. Come on, let’s get pissed.’

But Abby refused. Desperate to be alone, she disappeared to her room to mug up the Brahms concerto. It was the last piece she had done before she had cut her wrist. It would be unendurable not to be playing it tomorrow. Perhaps a miracle had happened and she could return to the violin, but she still hated giving up the RSO without a fight.

She couldn’t concentrate. Every note remembered was anguish. Throwing open her bedroom window, which looked on to the front garden, she disturbed a swarm of peacock butterflies gorging themselves on the buddleia. Was it proverbial vanity which made them match their rust-and-purple wings so perfectly to the pale purple flowers?

Thistledown floated through the air; the fields of stubble, platinum-blond in the morning sunshine, were now red-gold after the rain. The white trumpets of the convolvulus rioting along the hedgerow reminded her of her brass section. She could smell frying garlic and onions. Marcus must be cooking supper, banging pans after all that Muscadet. He had been so kind when Boris had humiliated her. She must find him work.

Then everything was forgotten as through the dusk she heard Viking, the ultimate peacock, practising, idling around with ‘Rachel’s Lament’, the sound carrying across the still lake. Oh God, he should be playing the solo. It would be tragic if Lionel persuaded George to drop the Requiem. Lionel was also poisoning the orchestra against her. How she longed to follow the path of meadowsweet down the stream and ask Viking’s advice.

Maria Kusak, who was playing the Brahms Violin Concerto, was yet another Shepherd Denston artist booked at 10 per cent less, because the RSO had employed Abby. A contemporary of Abby’s at the Moscow Conservatoire, she was, like Benny, very jealous of Abby’s former success. A charming, curvacious, bottled blonde with high cheek-bones and naughty slanting brown eyes, she had been one of Rodney’s pets and was upset to find such a dear doting old man had been replaced by her greatest rival.

Lionel, after yesterday’s humiliation, was revving up for a showdown. He had already had a word with George.

‘I wept for my musicians,’ he repeated sententiously, ‘and she mocked me. It is an honour to sit in the first chair of a great orchestra, but how can I have any authority as a leader if she constantly undermines me in front of the players.’

‘She’d better go back to playing the fiddle,’ said George, and had a sharp word with Abby to soft-pedal the histrionics.

‘Maria’s very popular with the Rutminster audience,’ he added brusquely. ‘We’ve nearly sold out this evening — give her her head.’

Maria was also very popular with the orchestra who gave her a round of applause when she arrived the following afternoon, but, although she dimpled and smiled, she was in fact in a furious temper. Having decided that George was as attractively macho as he was rich, she had slipped into Tower Records in Rutminster High Street to buy her own recording of the Saint-Saëns Third Concerto in order to sign it for him. She was not pleased to be told by the assistant, who did not recognize her, that she ought to have bought Abigail Rosen’s version — it was still easily the best.

On the other hand, Maria had a trump card, which she knew would crucify Abby. She was playing on Abby’s old Strad.

Simon Painshaw was also uptight and tearing his red dreadlocks because he had to open the second movement of the concerto with one of the most beautiful solos Brahms or anyone had ever written. All the woodwind were busy in that movement, but they were still only the Supremes to First Oboe’s Diana Ross.

Arriving at the hall, Simon had been accosted by Hilary, bossily ticking him off for not tuning up half an hour earlier so he could play in his quarter-final match in the RSO conker competition. As a result she had rescheduled his match for this evening in the meal-break before the concert.

Simon had become wildly agitated. He had been making reeds, the thin pipes through which oboists blow, which was a hellishly finickety job, since ten o’clock that morning, he said.

‘And I’m not playing any conker match this evening. I’ve got to psych myself up for my solo.’

‘Half the orchestra are in the conker competition,’ said Hilary furiously, ‘and they’re not going to wait around at your convenience. All you think about are your silly reeds.’

Simon had flipped and started screaming about fucking kids’ games. Abby, coming out of the conductor’s room, had backed him up and told Hilary to eff off.

‘Love conkers all,’ said a passing Viking in amusement.

Hilary rushed off to tell Lionel who started the rehearsal in an embattled mood.

Bill Thackery, Lionel’s co-leader, predictably nicknamed ‘Makepeace’ because he was kind, equable and always defusing squabbles, had heard the shouting in the passage.

‘What’s up with L’Appassionata?’ he asked as Lionel took his seat beside him, ‘P.M.T.?’

‘That was yesterday,’ said Lionel spitefully. ‘She’s got the rags up her today.’

Bill winced. He loathed Lionel’s coarseness. He glanced up at Abby whose face was a mask to hide her fear.

‘Fasten your seat-belts,’ murmured Hilary to Juno in front of her. ‘Turbulence ahead.’

From the first note it was quite clear that Maria had totally different ideas of interpretation to Abby, and Lionel totally agreed with her. They both completely ignored Abby, as Benny had done.

Abby tried to be accommodating, but she felt as though a great blood-blister was swelling inside her brain and she wanted to snatch back her Strad. She couldn’t bear to see it in such insensitive hands.

The second movement was even worse. Sulking because Simon had the good tune, Maria played flatly and lazily when she came in thirty-two bars later. Abby let her scratch away for four or five pages, then aware that Lionel was deliberately holding back his First Violins, she stopped the orchestra.

‘Can we please start this movement again? It was too slow.’

‘Why not beat a bit faster,’ said Hilary rudely.

Refusing to rise, Abby took Maria aside, suggesting a few changes. Maria snapped back that Rannaldini had warmly praised her interpretation.

‘Sure, sure, Maria, if you could just play with a little more passion.’

As Abby stepped back onto the rostrum, Maria made the orchestra laugh by sticking out her tongue at Abby’s back.

‘OK, from the beginning of the second movement,’ Abby gave the up beat, nodding at the bassoons who played A and F followed by an octave from the horns, before Simon came in with the rest of the woodwind. Simon looked as though he were in a trance, sucking his reed like an opium pipe, his fingers tense on the silver keys.

To distract everyone from such a breathtakingly beautiful sound, Maria pointedly rummaged in her violin case for some rosin to give extra grip to the horsehair in her bow. As she did so, a folded page fell out of her primrose-yellow shirt, fluttering down and landing on the rostrum. But as her panic-stricken hand shot out, Abby’s black ankle-boot stamped down on the note. Abby recognized Lionel’s flamboyant scrawl.

‘Give it to me,’ squealed Maria, ‘you’re not supposed to read other people’s letters.’

‘Ignore the stupid cow and follow me,’ read Abby slowly. Then she went ballistic, hurling her score at Lionel’s glossy head.

‘Quick,’ hissed Carmine to Steve Smithson. ‘Get Miles and Knickers down to witness this.’

‘You son-of-a-bitch,’ Abby howled at Lionel. ‘You’re fired.’

‘Maestro, Maestro,’ Lionel retrieved her score. ‘It was only ajoke. As Maria says you really shouldn’t read other people’s letters.’

‘Go on, get out, get OUT.’

Confronted by such fury, Lionel went, the picture of injured innocence. Steve, who played squash with Lionel, and was feeling well disposed towards him, promptly called out the orchestra, who all filed off into the band room.

‘We’ve got her,’ Steve murmured jubilantly to Lionel. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll return a vote of no confidence to the board. George, Miles, Mrs Parker, Ambrose, Canon Airlie, all want her out — they’ll be over the moon.’

‘At last we’ve broken her,’ said Lionel melodramatically, putting two shaking hands together in prayer. ‘And don’t you dare go back in there, Flora,’ he called out sharply, ‘or you’re fired.’

As Randy and Dixie started an idle game of ping-pong up at the far end of the room, Viking looked up at Abby’s framed photograph, which Charlton Handsome had somewhat provocatively hung over the fireplace.

‘She has a lovely face,’ he quoted thoughtfully. ‘God in His mercy lend her grace.’ Then, turning to Lionel, added, ‘I don’t like conductors used as target-practice, I think we ought to discuss this rationally.’

‘We can’t go on like this,’ said Bill Thackery.

Maria, who was thoroughly over-excited, said she’d never been so insulted in her life and she was very happy to add her weight to the vote against Abby.

Left alone in the empty auditorium, Abby slumped on the rostrum. Slowly all the lights were flicked off except the one over her lectern. She accepted it was the end. She knew she had overreacted, but it would never be any good with Lionel. The thorn in her firm young flesh had proved poisonous. She would leave, not him. The Brahms had jinxed her again. So sweet was ne’er so fatal. For a second she fingered the scar on her wrist.

Sadly she picked up the violin which Francis the Good Loser had inevitably left behind on his chair, caressing its glossy brown curves. Francis would soon be back to collect it. For a second she put it under her chin; it was still warm. Idly she tuned it.

Then, as if in a dream, she started playing the lovely tune with which the oboe opens the second movement. Somehow, out of the black depths of her despair and the sense of utter failure, the notes came to her, first faltering, many of them wrong, the tempo very shaky, then gradually gaining in strength and beauty.

She played it again, totally immersed in the sound and the sadness, then jumped out of her skin as, through the darkness, she heard a stealthy footstep and then the scraping of a chair. Then miraculous, like the horns of Elfland, she heard the bassoon, luminous and beautiful, echoing round the hall, then the octave on the horns, and then Simon starting the movement again. He didn’t need light, he knew it by heart. Like Orpheus, Abby had to steel herself not to look round. Then her heart leapt as she heard more footsteps and scraping chairs and the flute, the clarinet and the Second Bassoon joining in. It couldn’t be real, she must be dreaming, but someone was switching on the lights and now there was an arpeggio which could only have come from Viking, and the strings came in, which was the cue for the solo violin. Somehow her trembling hand managed to force her bow back and forth over the strings.

Tears were streaming down her face so fast, she wouldn’t have been able to see anyway, but through some mystical inspiration the notes came back to her, as the boards squeaked with more and more footsteps. At the first tutti it was clear that half the orchestra were back in their seats. She jumped as a double bass was knocked over.

Abby had played better technically in her life but never with such passion. As the horns and the woodwind returned to the first subject she had some wicked syncopation, six against four, but she kept her nerve, and then Viking was accompaning her, swooping divinely alongside, then Peter, sweet and ethereal, then rippling deep arpeggios on the bassoon, and the strings came in like a great flotilla guiding the returning, round-the-world sailor safely into port, until she had soared up to the final A.

Absolutely no-one spoke or moved, as Abby stood trembling, with her head thrown back, her eyes closed as though awaiting a blow.

‘Bravo,’ said a voice.

Then there was a storm of cheering and out of the corner of her eye Abby saw that the first chair was empty.

Unable to face anyone, she jumped off the rostrum, handed Francis his violin, leapt off the stage, stumbling as she landed, then racing up the gangway, pushed through the swing doors out into the park. Seeing her face deathly pale and still wet with tears as she ran down the High Street, the shoppers parted to let her through. Cars screeched to a halt as she bolted across the road, drawn helplessly towards the lake.

Following her in his car, Viking caught up with her as the town gave way to fields.

‘Well done,’ he yelled out of the window. ‘D’you want a drink?’

But Abby was completely dazed, unable to speak, gazing at him with huge, haunted reddened eyes.

‘We all walked out of the union meeting,’ he said gently. ‘We were glad to get shot of the bastard, none of us liked him. You’ve won, sweetheart.’

THIRTY-SIX

The next morning, George Hungerford received a letter of no confidence in Lionel as leader, and upheld Abby’s decision to sack him. Hilary, Steve Smithson, Carmine, Juno, Militant Moll and Ninion (who was still smarting over Catherine Jones getting the big solo in Rachel’s Requiem) were the only members of the orchestra who didn’t sign.

Although it was RSO policy that its musicians were not allowed to talk to the Press, George caught Cherub on the telephone to the Evening Standard diary.

‘Yes, we called Lionel the Incredible Sulk,’ he was saying in his shrill voice, ‘because he sulked all the time. What did he sulk about? Well, people nicking his hairdryer mostly. Can I think of anything nice about him? That’s a tricky one,’ Cherub scratched his blond curls and after a long silence, ‘not really… oh, yes I can.’

‘That’s enough,’ George pressed the cut-off button, then out of curiosity, asked, ‘what was the nice thing you remembered about Lionel?’

‘That his brother was much worse,’ said Cherub, going off into such giggles that George had to join in.

All the same the RSO were left without a leader. The post was hastily advertised and leaders applied from all over the world. Many expected to have their air fares paid. Others crept surreptitiously into auditions hoping no-one would recognize them and sneak to their respective orchestras, or later know they had suffered the humiliation of not being offered the job. It was a laborious, expensive process. Miles and Mrs Parker, who’d lost a powerful ally in Lionel, were all for asking Hugo back. But Abby would have none of it. The sight of Hugo sleekly smirking in the leader’s chair at the Albert Hall during the CCO’s prom had convinced her she never wanted to work with him again.

Bill Thackery, who’d acted as leader since Lionel left, put himself forward, but was rejected as too stodgily dependable and too lacking in charisma. Rodney had only employed him in the first place because he had once played cricket for Rutshire and scored centuries in the RSO’s annual needle-match against the CCO.

Aware that she had hurt Bill, Abby had a restless night. Wandering round the garden at sunrise, leaving footprints on the dewy lawn, she realized after the long silence of the summer, a robin was singing again in the old crab-apple tree. Revelling in the sweet liquid notes, Abby was suddenly reminded of Julian Pellafacini, the kind, diplomatic, infinitely charismatic albino leader of Rannaldini’s New York Orchestra. She’d kept the letter he’d written her after she’d cut her wrist. Not caring that it was the middle of the night in America she called him at once.

‘Did I wake you?’

‘No, I have insomnia over Rannaldini. He sack everyone, I never come back from coffee-break to find the same musicians, yesterday he make me play three times alone in front of the orchestra.’

‘How obnoxious,’ said Abby furiously, adding hastily, ‘I’d never do that to you. Please come and lead my orchestra. We’re premiering Boris Levitsky’s Requiem in three weeks and I need you to show the strings how to play it, and in November we’re recording Winifred Trapp’s Harp Concertos.’

‘A wonderful composer,’ sighed Julian.

‘You’re the first person who’s heard of her,’ said Abby joyfully.

‘Rannaldini told me you were leaving.’

‘Not any more.’

‘Then I will come. My wife love England and ’ate New York.’

‘We will find you a house. How will you escape?’

‘Leave it to me.’

Sweeping onto the platform a week later to conduct a concert version of Parsifal, Rannaldini found his orchestra crying with laughter and his leader sitting at the front desk in an emerald-green pleated dress, green high heels, a white pudding-basin hat and full make-up, and sacked him on the spot. By this time, Julian’s contract with the RSO had been signed.

Julian arrived at the beginning of October and moved with his wife and children into a beautiful rented house in the Close paid for by the RSO. He was paid twice as much as Lionel, but he was worth every penny.

He was so kind, so respected, so gravely charming, that he had only to clap his hands in rehearsals for everyone to shut up and listen. He agreed that Rachel’s Requiem was a masterpiece, explaining it to the more inexperienced or resistant players until everyone found themselves singing the tunes.

The young players seemed to absorb his talent by osmosis, and Old Henry at last had someone to appreciate his stories and argue with about which quartet was Beethoven’s finest.

Abby was appalled by Julian’s appearance when he arrived. His long straight white hair had receded, he was as black under the eyes as his dark glasses, and he had lost over twenty pounds which his thin, stork-like frame could ill afford, but gradually he stopped talking too much about Rannaldini.

Miss Priddock was soon baking him cakes, Miss Parrott knitting him scarves, even Flora picked a lot of sloes intending to make him sloe gin, but they only gathered fluff in the fridge.

‘He’s terribly attractive,’ said Candy.

‘But far too nice to be heterosexual,’ sighed Clare.

That was before they’d met his lovely bosomy wife, Luisa, whom he adored and who gave uproarious spaghetti-and-red-wine parties at the house in the Close on Sundays to which rank-and-file players were asked with section leaders, so relations within the orchestra improved dramatically.

‘To make good music,’ said Julian, ‘you need to have confidence and people you trust on either side of you.’

‘Julian’s a mensch,’ said Abby. ‘That’s someone with standards, a good friend, a man you are proud to know.’

She had achieved great kudos for finding him. He also gave her confidence. She could easily have been jealous of his popularity, but he never took decisions without her, and gradually she became less aggressive and tactless, saying please and thank you, and taking people aside for a quiet word in the break rather than humiliating them in front of the entire orchestra.

‘I think that’s been played better in the past,’ she suggested to Jerry the Joker, after he’d made an appalling cock-up of a bassoon solo.

‘Yes, but not by me,’ said Jerry, to howls of laughter all round.

Morale was so high in Julian’s first weeks that everyone was convinced his leadership had been entirely responsible for the New World and Rannaldini sweeping the board at the Gramophone Awards. They didn’t even mind that Edith Spink and the CCO had won an early music award for Purcell’s King Arthur.

As the date for the première of Rachel’s Requiem approached, Boris, still minus Astrid, started hanging around H.P. Hall, tearful, apprehensive, aggressive by turns, changing everything.

The rows between him and Abby were pyrotechnic.

‘I’m conducting this piece.’

‘I wrote zee bloody thing.’

‘You didn’t even remember you’d introduced a variation of “Rachel’s Lament” as a violin solo in the “Agnus Dei”.’

After hearing Cathie Jones, still desperately nervous in the ‘Libera Me’, Boris went into an orgy of self-doubt and threatened to withdraw the lament altogether.

‘It sound immaculate in the head. Then you hear orchestra hacking through eet.’

Fortunately, George Hungerford, who’d become a terrifying figure of menace to Boris since threatening to make him pay back his advance, had been listening unnoticed in the stalls and came up and shook Boris’s hand.

‘Congratulations, it was well worth waiting for.’

Boris was so overcome he burst into tears. Abby then put on the pressure, persuading him that ‘Rachel’s Lament’ would only work if Viking played it. In the interests of art, Boris reluctantly gave in. As a result, Viking nearly got his tooth knocked out again.

Wandering into H.P. Hall after another late-night moonlighting, and no doubt pleasuring Astrid, he noticed Julian in the leader’s room poring over a score. Beside Julian, Viking could see lustrous black curls, and a beautiful lean body in a checked shirt and jeans. Confronted by such a delectable bottom, Viking couldn’t resist pinching it. Next moment an enraged Boris had swung round, and Viking was belting down the passage.

‘Sorry, sorry Boris,’ he pleaded. ‘Don’t hit me again. I’ve josst spent five hundred quid at the dentist. You’ve lost so much weight, I thought you were Abby. Look,’ he went on, as Boris kept on coming, ‘Astrid wants to come back to you, she’s absolutely miserable with me.’

‘She is?’ Boris lowered his fist. ‘Oh my Astrid.’

Terrific news, thought Abby, overhearing the conversation as she came out of the conductor’s room. ‘And Boris has agreed “Rachel’s Lament” sounds better on the French horn, so he’s written it back in for you,’ she told Viking.

‘Sweet of Boris,’ said Viking coolly, ‘but I’m flying to Glasgow tomorrow to play a Mozart concerto with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, their First Horn’s dislocated a shoulder. I cleared it with George,’ he added as Abby’s face contorted with fury.

Blue would have killed him, reflected Viking, if he’d stolen Cathie’s solo.

Abby could have killed him anyway. ‘And that Hugh Grant hairstyle doesn’t suit you at all,’ she yelled after his departing back view.

The première in fact was a success. All the London critics came down for a number of reasons: Levitsky was still a name; they were curious to see how Abby was making out; but, most of all, they wanted to hear this great new leader who had graced little Rutminster with his lustre. Even the Rutshire Butcher, deliberately invited to the last rehearsal and force-fed lobster thermidor and Moët afterwards by George, wrote that it was good to have some meaty tunes after all those one-note jobs, which had dominated the classical hit-parade for so long.

The two representatives attending from the Arts Council were positively orgasmic about the piece. Nothing got them going like 75 per cent of the audience looking bewildered. By carefully placing round the hall a number of the Friends of the Orchestra to cheer and stamp, George managed to generate a standing ovation for Boris, who looked so mournfully handsome and romantic, that the audience kept on clapping, particularly when he led Cathie Jones forward. Aware that Blue’s good-luck card was hidden in the pocket of her black dress, she had played exquisitely.

Seeing the pink-and-orange chrysanthemums Miss Priddock was bringing on for Abby, Boris thrust them into Cathie’s rough red hands. ‘I zank you viz all my ’eart. I feel Rachel forge eve me at last.’

‘Well, you must be happy with that,’ said Abby, chucking down her baton and the Requiem score, as she and Boris finally returned to the conductor’s room.

‘No-one hackled, no-one booed,’ said Boris darkly. ‘Maybe I am not avant-garde any more, maybe I’m too predictable.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.’

But the next moment, predictability and the avant-garde were forgotten, as Astrid, wearing a new lilac suit, no doubt bought with the proceeds of Viking’s moonlighting, barged into the conductor’s room without bothering to knock, straight into Boris’s arms.

THIRTY-SEVEN

After the première, George took a party out to dinner at the Old Bell. His guests included Abby, Julian and his lovely bosomy wife Luisa, Serena Westwood, head of Artists and Repertoire at Megagram who were recording the Requiem at the end of the month, Jack Rodway, the evening’s sponsor, who was a specialist in receiverships in a leading firm of accountants, and, representing the Arts Council, a caring beard called Gilbert Greenford and his ‘partner’, a folk-weave biddy called Gwynneth.

Having laid on limos to the Old Bell, George was extremely irritated to be lectured by Gwynneth all the way on the evils of air-conditioning in large petrol-swilling cars.

‘You ought to get a cycle,’ she stared beadily at George’s straining waistband, ‘Gilbert and I cycle everywhere, indeed Gilbert has had his cycle, Clara (after Clara Schumann, of course), since he was at Keble.’

It was clearly going to be difficult reconciling the middle-of-the road tastes of Serena Westwood, a single parent whose calm beautiful face was belied by a rapacious body, with those of Gilbert and Gwynneth from the Arts Council, who only liked the obscure and discordant, and of Jack Rodway, who had a penchant for Boléro because ‘it makes me feel right randy’.

To George’s further irritation, he arrived at the hotel to find a joyfully drunk Boris, who’d been on the red wine all day, had rolled up not only with Astrid, but also Marcus and Flora who was totally unsuitably dressed in sawn-off Black-Watch-tartan dungarees. George hadn’t spoken to Flora since she’d brought Marcus over to be impossibly rude to Peggy Parker at the sixtieth-birthday concert, but he had noticed her cool deadpan face among the violas, or more often the top of her red-gold head because her freckled nose was always in a book. He knew she was trouble.

Once the waiter had added another table, Boris, Marcus, Astrid and the Pallafacinis commandeered it, wanting to mull over the concert and talk musical shop. They had kept a place for Flora.

But determined Flora shouldn’t cause any more trouble and to keep her away from Gilbert and Gwynneth, George frogmarched her down the table into the seat nearest the window, with Jack Rodway next to her, hissing: ‘He’s paid for this evening, so bloody well be nice to him.’

Planning to put himself opposite her to keep an eye on her and at the same time talk business with Jack Rodway, George held out a seat for Serena Westwood, intending her to sit next to him, so they could discuss recordings for the RSO. But alas, a second later, ghastly Gwynneth had landed on the seat like a wet lump of potter’s clay.

‘I feel you and I should get to know each other, Mr Hungerford, and you sit on my left, Mr Brian-Knowles,’ she added archly to Miles, nearly giving him a black eye with one of her huge silver earrings, hanging like gongs on either side of her round, smug, pasty face.

Gwynneth had buck teeth, beady little dark eyes, a pepper-and-salt bun, and was also a great lard-mountain of self-importance as she was constantly fawned on by men who ran orchestras and ballet and opera companies who knew she had the power to slash their grants.

Seeing Flora gazing at Gwynneth in horror, George snapped at her not to stare. So Flora looked out of the window at the yellow willow spears falling into the dark river, and at the lights on the bridge silhouetted against the russet glow of the Rutminster sky.

On all sides, at other tables, ancient residents were ekeing out slices of cheddar and half-bottles of red, nudging each other because they recognized Abby. Some of them also recognized George from the local papers, because of the row he was having with the council over planning permission for the fifty acres on Cowslip Hill.

George certainly had a terrific effect on waiters, who had all converged on the table, handing over red velvet, tasselled menus, gabbling about Plats du Jour, and filling glasses, particularly Boris’s, whenever they were empty.

‘Penny for your forts,’ asked Jack Rodway, who’d been admiring Flora’s profile.

‘I was thinking,’ replied Flora with a sweet smile, ‘what an ugly cow that is opposite.’

‘Her “partner” Gilbert is worse,’ murmured Jack. ‘I sat next to ‘im on the drive down. Stinks like a pole cat.’

Flora giggled. ‘Obviously thinks avant-garde is more important than Right Guard.’

Jack looked blank for a second, then roared with laughter.

‘That’s right, Flora.’

Jack Rodway had dissipated blue eyes in a ruddy expensive face, wore a sharp navy-blue suit, and was such an alley cat that Flora expected to see furry pointed ears protruding through his thatch of blond hair.

‘I suppose,’ she observed, ‘receivers and divorce lawyers are the only people making any money these days.’

‘Too right, Flora, with twenty thousand firms going belly up every year, it’s a growf industry, nime of the gime.’

‘Must be awfully depressing, like being an undertaker or a nurse in a vivisection clinic,’ Flora shivered. ‘All those poor employees losing their jobs.’

‘We try and mike it as pineless as possible for the personnel involved. No fanks,’ Jack rejected a wholemeal roll. Over forty, a flat stomach required sacrifices.

‘Moules are nice, Flora, just come in,’ suggested the head waiter, who was a great pal of Flora’s mother.

‘Lovely, I’ll have those,’ Flora beamed back at him. ‘I’m so hopeless at decisions.’

‘I’ll have smoked salmon, followed by steak and French fries,’ said Jack Rodway.

Suddenly Flora twigged.

‘You must be an invaluable contact for George. Presumably when companies go into receivership they often have huge crumbling old buildings that no longer qualify as listed, if you knock off a few cornices, but are ripe for development as office blocks or supermarkets.’

‘What a very astute young lidy you are, Flora,’ said Jack Rodway, filling up her glass. ‘Wasted on the violas.’

George, from his bootfaced expression, had obviously heard every word, but was being monopolized by Gwynneth.

‘I shall not let my sword sleep in my hand,’ she was saying affectedly, ‘until I have routed out sexual apartheid in British orchestras and until 50 per cent of the repertoire is by women composers.’

George choked on his glass of wine. Gwynneth turned greedily to the menu. As Megagram and the RSO were splitting the bill, she and Goaty Gilbert, who had granny specs and green teeth, surrounded by a straggly ginger beard, chose all the most expensive things on the menu.

‘Disgusting pigs,’ muttered Flora, receiving another glare from George. But nothing could dim her happiness. In the pocket of her Black-Watch-tartan dungarees was a postcard left in her pigeon hole:

Darling Flora,

Astrid is moving out, thank God. The pillow talk was very limited. Will you have a drink with me the second I get back from Glasgow?

All love,

Viking.

Viking was another alley cat, reflected Flora, but she felt he was the only person who could get her over Rannaldini. For the moment, she could practise on Jack.

‘D’you know Fatima Singh, Mr Hungerford?’ Across the table Gwynneth was returning the attack.

‘Does she?’ asked Flora.

‘What?’ said Gwynneth impatiently.

‘Sing?’ giggled Flora.

‘No, no, she composes. You must be familiar with her Elegy for oppressed Lesbians in the Harem.’

‘Best place for them,’ said Jack. ‘All girls togewer.’

‘She makes lovely use of the sitar,’ went on Gwynneth, totally ignoring them. ‘Gilbert and I note you have no Asian music in your repertoire, Mr Hungerford.’

Down the table, Boris was gazing into Astrid’s eyes and murmuring Pushkin in his deep husky voice. Abby, on an après-concert high, was bending Gilbert’s dirty ear about the wonders of Winifred Trapp and Fanny Mendelssohn.

‘We have a terrific harpist, Miss Parrott, who’s mad about the Trapp solos.’

The Pellafacinis were talking about children with Serena Westwood.

‘I’m not an achiever,’ Luisa was saying apologetically. ‘I look after Julian and the kids.’

Abandoning George for a second, Gwynneth was now discussing madrigals with Miles.

‘The musicians sing them on the coach on the way to concerts,’ he was saying.

‘How joyful,’ Gwynneth brought her hands together with a clash of bangles. ‘When I come down on my three-day assessment of the orchestra, I hope I may be permitted to join in. We could sing motets as well — they are the religious equivalent of the domestic madrigal.’ And she went off into a flurry offa, la, las, in a quavering soprano.

If she got locked into the coffin-shaped lavatory with Viking, decided Flora, there wouldn’t be room for Hilary and Militant Moll as well.

Marcus sat in a daze, his fingers playing idly on the white table cloth, still coming down after the Requiem, unable to say a word on the noisy journey to the hotel, when everyone else was going beserk expressing their approval.

Suddenly he turned to Boris and blurted out: ‘That was one of the most beautiful pieces of music I’ve ever heard, like discovering America or walking round Chartres Cathedral for the first time.’

There was a pause as everyone suddenly remembered the Requiem was why they were there.

Serena Westwood, who believed that a bonk a day kept the doldrums away, and who had high hopes of George, turned and looked at Marcus for the first time. What a beauty, such a sweet, sensitive yet strong face, and he was the only man she’d met whom the Hugh Grant hairstyle really suited.

‘Marcus is why Requiem happen,’ said Boris excitedly. ‘Ee copy, ee transcribe, ee listen, ee encourage, is super pianist, you must give him a contract,’ he added to Serena. ‘Let’s all dreenk to Marcus.’ Having drained his glass, he smashed it in the fireplace.

The other diners looked wildly excited. The waiters came running in in alarm, until George waved to them to forget it and to bring Boris another glass.

‘What have you done recently?’ Serena asked a desperately blushing Marcus.

‘T-teaching mostly. I had a recital in Bradford last week.’

‘Good?’

‘Not brilliant, a string broke in the middle of Bartók’s Allegro Barbaro. It sounded like a bomb going off, all the audience tore out, not many of them bothered to come back.’ Marcus smiled deprecatingly.

‘You must send me a tape,’ said Serena enthusiastically. ‘Perhaps you should have a crack at a piano competition. It’s good experience and the best way of getting known.’

‘It’s a lousy idea,’ snapped Abby, abandoning Gilbert in mid-flow. ‘Marcus doesn’t need gladiatorial contests. He’s gotta develop at his own pace.’

Marcus opened his mouth and shut it again

‘Well, at least get an agent,’ urged Serena. ‘I could suggest-’

‘If he needs an agent,’ snapped Abby, ‘he can go to Howie Denston.’

‘Oh Abby,’ sighed Flora, ‘when will you learn not to be a bitch in the manger?’

‘Thank you.’ Gwynneth’s small mouth was watering like a waste pipe as a great vat of caviar was placed in front of her. ‘Did you mention Bradford?’ she called out to Marcus.

Marcus nodded, mortified still to be the centre of attention.

‘Did you have time to visit the Early Music Shop?’ asked Gwynneth. ‘What a pity, Gilbert brought a portative organ set from there and made it up for my birthday. He’s thinking of tackling a crumhorn or even timbrels next.’

‘What wild ecstasy,’ murmured Flora, contemplating a black, shiny mountain of mussels and wondering how hungry she felt.

‘Did you listen to the CCO at the proms?’ asked Gilbert, forking up lobster at great speed. ‘There is no doubt, they are the best orchestra in the South of England and played as such.’

‘That’s rubbish,’ called Flora down the table. ‘We can play just as well as the CCO. Ow, ow, ow.’ She glanced reproachfully at George. ‘Why d’you kick me like that? Just as well, particularly now we’ve got Julian.’

‘Zat is true,’ Boris dragged his eyes away from Astrid. ‘Zank you for your support, Julian, and welcome to England. Let us drink to Julian.’ Another glass smashed in the fireplace.

Flora turned giggling to Jack, who had demolished his smoked salmon in a trice, and was now helping himself to her mussels.

‘We’ve had Boris living with us on and off for the last two months. He’s exactly like a two year old, smashing everything and getting his words muddled up.’

Boris grinned down the table at them.

‘Always Flora take the puss out of me, but she is good friend who help me. To Flora!’ Crash went a third glass.

‘Cheaper to hire them by the two dozen,’ suggested Julian.

But Gwynneth had put on a soppy, artists-will-be-artists smile. ‘And what is your next opus, Mr Levitsky?’

‘He’s going to write a moonlighting sonata for Viking,’ announced Flora.

Gwynneth raised a reproving hand with another crash of bangles. ‘I asked Mr Levitsky.’

‘I’m going to write opera of King Lear.’

‘That could be very fine,’ mused Gwynneth. ‘Good women’s roles, and you could make an important statement about paternal oppression.’

‘Oh get real,’ muttered Flora.

‘Will you use a Russian translation or tackle iambic pentameter?’ asked Gilbert earnestly.

‘Dactyl and Sponsor,’ grinned Flora, raising her glass to Jack Rodway, who promptly put his arm round her shoulders.

‘I ’ave to say, George, I’ll only sponsor concerts in the future if I can have Flora sitting next to me afterwards.’

‘George ordered me to be nice to you,’ said Flora. ‘And it hasn’t been difficult at all,’ she added, kissing Jack on the cheek.

George was clearly hopping, but, trapped by the need to behave well in front of Gwynneth, he was powerless.

‘You’ve no idea the fun I’ve had playing on Gilbert’s small organ,’ she was now telling him. ‘Of course today’s musicians need an organ that will fit into an estate car or in Gilbert’s case to fold up in a briefcase. Were you aware, Mr Hungerford, that small organs were neither usual nor common until recent times?’

‘I’ve always said they had more fun in the Middle Ages,’ interrupted Flora. ’Ow, ow, why d’you keep kicking me?’

‘Just shut up,’ whispered George with a flash of clenched teeth.

Finishing up the juice under her moules, Flora missed her mouth with the spoon and realized how drunk she was. She looked at George through her eyelashes. Why did they all think he was so attractive? He almost had a treble chin from so many sponsors’ dinners, and the big horn-rimmed spectacles emphasized the tired, belligerent eyes. He also had the restlessness of the emotionally involved elsewhere. For such a macho man, it must have been a terrible blow when his wife walked out.

Gwynneth was obviously thinking along the same lines. ‘D’you have a partner, Mr Hungerford?’

‘I’m separated,’ said George curtly. ‘Did you both try relationship counselling?’

‘I don’t hold with that sort of thing.’ George was fed up with being nice to her.

‘Don’t be so on the defensive,’ teased Gwynneth. ‘Even Gilbert and I are counselled every six months, a sort of spiritual MOT.’

Her mouth was watering again as a waiter flambéed her tournedos au foie gras on a side-table.

‘I am not a meat-eater normally, but “when in Rome”,’ Gwynneth smiled round as if she were making a colossal concession.

‘My mother went to a marriage-guidance counsellor,’ said Flora. ‘She said they were useless and had more problems than she did.’

Gwynneth ignored Flora, but persisted with George. ‘You want to get in touch with your feelings.’

Flora decided George needed rescuing. She must be drunk.

‘What I’d like to ask,’ she said to Gwynneth, ‘is why the London Met — yes, I read it in The Times — are allowed to push off for three months every summer, so their hall can be used for jazz, pop concerts, gospel, cajun music and other relative garbage, and you pay them a massive thirteen million a year, which is more than the RSO grant for the next forty years. Meanwhile we play all the year round except for a month in the summer. We travel fifty thousand miles in coaches, providing music for nine counties and we pay more back to the Government in VAT than you give us in rotten subsidy. So actually we’re a net earner.’

‘That’s enoof, Flora,’ said George who entirely agreed with her, but couldn’t be seen to support her in public.

‘I cannot reveal the reasons we give subsidies to other institutions,’ said Gwynneth primly.

‘Why not?’ demanded Flora. ‘You receive government money, therefore the public (and that’s me) has the right to know. Everyone needs rises down here.’

‘Hear, hear,’ agreed Jack, ignoring a glare from George and filling Flora’s glass. ‘Too much bloody fudgin’.’

Gwynneth’s little brown eyes were suddenly as dead and opaque as sheeps’ droppings, her furious face twitching.

‘I adore that top, Gwynnie,’ said Miles hastily. ‘You look marvellous in indigo.’

‘It comes from a planet-friendly range,’ said Gwynneth, looking most unfriendly towards Flora. ‘Even the buttons are biodegradable. I’ll give you their card for your partner.’

Marcus could feel Serena’s ankle rubbing against his leg like Scriabin, making him incapable of eating his Dover sole. He’d given eight piano lessons earlier in the day, he ought to practise for a couple of hours when he got home, but he’d do anything for a fat record contract, and Serena looked rather like Grace Kelly in High Society.

Across the table, Abby and Julian had hardly touched their food.

‘It was a wonderful concert,’ Julian was saying.

‘I’m really looking forward to conducting Winifred Trapp next week,’ said Abby.

‘Must have a slash,’ said Jack getting up.

‘As long as no-one slashes our grant any more,’ Flora shouted after him.

Relieved to see that Gwynneth was still nose to nose with Miles, George looked across at Flora.

‘Pleased with Julian?’

‘Oh yes,’ sighed Flora, ‘he’s given us such confidence, and he’s so approachable after Lionel. No problem’s too small for him, not even Gilbert’s organ.’

George shook his head. ‘You’re a minx.’

‘I’m a cunning little vixen.’

‘Your doggy bags, Mr Hungerford,’ the waiter put two foil-wrapped packets beside George’s plate.

‘You’ve got dogs?’ said Flora in surprise.

‘Three Rottweilers.’

‘Four, counting you,’ said Flora. ‘I like Rottweilers,’ she added, remembering wistfully how she used to romp with Rannaldini’s.

‘You haven’t eaten much,’ George glanced up at the pudding trolley rumbling towards them. ‘You better have an ice, kids like ices.’

Flora shook her head, her red hair splaying out like a marigold. ‘No, no, I don’t like anything that gets in touch with my fillings.’

Then George did smile, lifting his heavy face like a sudden shaft of sunlight on a limestone cliff.

‘Everyone’s having a ball,’ said Flora. ‘Thank you — it’s been a terrific evening.’

But she had reckoned without Gwynneth, whose ethnic crimson skirt was about to pop, and thick pepper-and-salt hair about to escape from its bun, as she washed down her final mouthful of tournedos au foie gras, with her fourth glass of Pouilly-Fumé.

‘You are driving, Gilbert.’

Gilbert looked livid, but his mouth was too crammed with monkfish to refuse.

Gwynneth then turned her shiny off-white face to George.

‘Isn’t it bizarre the way you hear a name for the first time and then hear it again and again. Miles has just mentioned Winifred Trapp. Did you know that Rannaldini has just recorded all Winifred Trapp’s Harp Concertos with American Bravo?’

There was a stunned, horrified pause.

‘Lovely shimmering music,’ went on Gwynneth, delighted at the consternation she had caused. ‘An advance copy arrived on my desk this morning. Although Rannaldini, or rather Sir Roberto, tells me he recorded it in Prague very cheaply, the quality is superb. I thought he’d lost his fire, after his last wife left him, but his new partner has regenerated him.’

Watching the colour drain out of Flora’s flushed, happy face, Miles wondered if she’d had anything to do with passing on the information.

‘Of course Rannaldini’s always been innovative,’ went on Gwynneth smugly. ‘And what is more, he and Dame Hermione have just recorded all Fanny Mendelssohn’s songs with Winifrid Trapp’s orchestration. Quite marvellous, don’t you agree, Gilbert?’

‘Indeed,’ said Gilbert, who was trying to scrape hollandaise sauce out of his straggly ginger beard. ‘I think if Fanny and Felix had lived, she would have been the more significant composer, although I agree with the Mendelssohn Society that had Felix lived he would have been greater than Richard Wagner.’

George’s face was limestone again.

‘When did Rannaldini record this?’ he asked bleakly.

‘In September,’ said Gwynneth, who was now leering at the pudding trolley. ‘That gateau does look tasty. They get these things out so quickly these days, but Rannaldini’ll want to give Winifred, it’s pronounced Vinifred actually, a real push, so I doubt if they’ll release it before January or February. Such a slap in the face for folk who say there are no great women composers.’

‘I knew nothing about this,’ said Julian, appalled.

‘Nor did I,’ said Serena Westwood grimly. American Bravo were Megagram’s biggest rivals.

Abby was frantically trying to work out how Rannaldini could have pre-empted her. The brochures, already late because of so many changes, had only been sent out in September. Who else could have told him — Hugo? Lionel? Perhaps unthinkingly Marcus could have said something to Helen. She’d heard Rannaldini was enraged that the RSO had snapped Julian up, but that wouldn’t have given him enough time. Either way she’d been left with Egmont on her face.

THIRTY-EIGHT

As a result of Gwynneth’s revelations, Megagram pulled the plug on Abby. Serena Westwood had been singularly uncharmed by her peremptory behaviour throughout dinner and she and Megagram had no desire to record obscure repertoire they had been led to believe was exclusive, in competition with the mighty Rannaldini and Harefield.

George and Miles were equally uncharmed to be lumbered with a Fanny Mendelssohn and Winifred Trapp series with no recordings to back it up. Viking’s new nickname, ‘Poverty Trapp’, proved to be prophetic. At the first concert, there were more people on the platform than in the audience.

Having worked flat out in September and October, Abby was due for a break in November, and flew to America to see her mother. She spent most of the vacation locked in her bedroom familiarizing herself with the remaining Trapp-Mendelssohn repertoire and Rachel’s Requiem (which was now being recorded in December) — anything to avoid her mother’s constant moaning that Abby would never get off the shelf and provide her with grandchildren.

‘There must be some guy in your life, Abigail.’

For a second Abby’s thoughts flickered towards Viking, then sadly she admitted there was no-one.

November had been so mild, that as she was driven back from the airport, she noticed palest green hazel catkins already blending with the amber leaves still hanging from willow and blackthorn. It was a beautiful day. Reaching the H.P. Hall in the lunch-hour, she found Viking asleep under a horse-chestnut tree. He’d probably been up all night, moonlighting. Like some Victorian personification of autumn, his gold hair was spread out on the bleached grass, and his slumped yet still graceful body was almost entirely covered in kiteshaped orange leaves.

Happy days for him, thought Abby wistfully. Seeing an unusually angelic smile on his face, she was about to wake him. Then she noticed a piece of cardboard, cut in the shape of a tombstone, propped against his feet. On it someone had written:

Here lies Viking,

Very much to all our liking,

Who fucked himself to death.

With a howl of misery, Abby turned and ran inside.

Her mood was not improved when she learnt that George had axed the last two Trapp-Mendelssohn concerts and replaced them with lollipops, and that Megagram were now having cold feet about putting up the money for Rachel’s Requiem. This would be catastrophic for Boris, who had already spent all the advance.

At an emergency board meeting, Peggy Parker said she might bankroll the Requiem, but only if Sonny’s just completed Interruption Serenade could be used as a filler on the CD with a little picture of balding parrot-faced Sonny beside shaggy Boris on the sleeve. The plan was that the Requiem would be recorded in a studio, but the Interruption Serenade would be recorded live at its première just before Christmas, then Sonny could include as many interruptions as possible. Peggy Parker was not at all happy about Abby conducting either work, and after a few telephone calls to Serena Westwood at Megagram, who would still be marketing and distributing the record, felt she had discovered an ally and was biding her time.

Abby felt her authority ebbing away. Worse was to come. The RSO were due to play Messiah at the Cotchester Festival in December. At the last moment, Jason, the rackety owner of Macho Motors, ratted on his agreement to sponsor the performance. This was because he’d failed to get Abby into bed, and because the BBC wouldn’t allow one of his flash cars to be parked in the nave during the concert.

‘I can’t see why not,’ grumbled Flora. ‘Triumphal cars are always turning up in Milton’s religious poems.’

‘It’s a Ferrari, not a Triumph,’ said Marcus.

Abby was in no mood for jokes. As the concert was to be transmitted on Christmas Eve, it would be a ghastly humiliation if the RSO had to pull out through lack of funding.

They had only been invited to take part in the festival because Dame Edith, impressed by Abby’s début concert, had nagged the organizers. If they weren’t careful, their bitter rivals, the CCO, locked in mortal combat with the RSO for the same audiences, sponsors and subsidies from the Arts Council, would step into the breach.

As a final straw, that even more famous Dame, Hermione Harefield, whose single of ‘I Know that my Redeemer Liveth’ had sold over a million copies, had been booked as one of the soloists and would ‘Rejoice Greatly’ (which was on the flip side of the single) to see Abby so discomfited.

Abby was determined not to be beaten. As she had just received a large royalty cheque from the reissue of her early records, she blew the lot on a hefty insurance policy with Honesty Insurance in Rutminster High Street on condition that they sponsored Messiah.

Honesty Insurance drove a hard bargain. They wanted their slogan, ‘Honesty is the Best Policy’ on posters all over the cathedral as well as their name on the credits. The BBC refused. The deadlock was only broken when the Bishop of Cotchester, a pompous old fossil on the Venturer Board, agreed to mention the company and the slogan in his interval address.

Abby was livid George wasn’t more impressed by her White Knight gesture when she barged into his office to tell him the good news.

‘Honesty Insurance are a bunch of crooks,’ he said, only giving her half his attention because he was trying to sign his letters around a weaving, purring John Drummond.

‘They’ve given me this,’ Abby waved a cheque under George’s nose.

‘We better bank it at once. Jack Rodway says they’re about to go belly-oop. I hope you don’t lose out on that policy. You’d have done better to sponsor the concert yourself.’

Like most successful property developers, George believed only in using other people’s money. When he took over the RSO he had vowed never to give them a penny. He did, however, have a long-term crush on Dame Hermione. She was thirty-nine like him. He and Ruth, also an avid fan, had enjoyed many of her concerts, and worn out her famous LP of the Verdi Requiem. Hermione, like Ruth, was someone George thought of as a ‘real lady’. He would therefore have been prepared to bankroll Messiah and pay Hermione her vast fee, her first-class air fare and her bill at the Cotchester Hilton. Now, thank God, Abby had saved him the trouble.

To avoid her nagging him about rain pouring through the hall roof, he had swarmed off for a lunch-time meeting with Rutminster District Council.

‘Perhaps one of Mr Hungerford’s builders could put in a cheap tender,’ suggested Miss Priddock.

Abby laughed without humour: ‘There is nothing cheap nor tender about Mr Hungerford.’

After a long and obviously successful lunch, George was back wafting brandy fumes, chewing on a huge cigar, and making a nuisance of himself at the afternoon’s rehearsal.

‘You’ve got to keep Messiah moving,’ he told the orchestra. ‘Particularly in part two when there aren’t many good tunes, before the “Hallelujah Chorus” wakes the audience up, and you’ve got to really belt it out to be heard in a big cathedral.’

Abby lost her temper. ‘Just because you come from Huddersfield, it doesn’t mean you own the work.’

‘Nor do you,’ shouted Carmine, who was anxious to put Abby down and to ingratiate himself with George. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing conducting Messiah when it was your lot who crucified the poor sod in the first place.’

‘That’s out of order, Carmine,’ snapped Julian.

‘It was Handel’s descendants,’ yelled back Abby, ‘who sent six million of our lot to the gas chambers.’

‘Please, everyone,’ Julian broke the horrified silence. ‘George is right — Abby, Luisa and I visited the cathedral last week, it’s huge. I know you all know Messiah backwards, but the audience knows it backwards too, so we can’t afford to make mistakes.’

‘Aint it rarver like takin’ coals to Newcastle,’ said Barry, who was hugging his double bass to keep warm. ‘I fort it was the CCO who’d cornered the baroque market. They’re the ones always winnin’ prizes.’

‘That’s why our reputation’s on the line,’ said George.

Messiah requires a very small orchestra, just strings, bassoons, oboes, two trumpets, timps and a harpsichord. So it was a depleted and resentful bunch who boarded the coach in the bitter cold under a lowering mustard-yellow sky the following afternoon. They had all been refused rises and resented having to trail over to Cotchester for no extra money.

With no Eldred and Peter Plumpton, the bridge four was incomplete. With no Hilary and Lionel gone, Ninion and Militant Moll couldn’t sing madrigals on their own. Without Miss Parrott, Dimitri gloomily shared a back seat with his cello.

All the pretty girls, nervous of appearing on television, drooped because there was no Celtic Mafia, except Randy, who was now an item with Candy, to jolly things along. The only cheerful note was Flora running on at the last moment, clean hair flopping, handing out tabloids like an air hostess. All the orchestra, except Hilary, who pretended to despise gossip, were obsessed with the collapse of the Prince of Wales’s marriage and had divided themselves into pro-Charles and pro-Diana factions.

Now they fell on the latest update in ecstasy.

‘I fancy the Brigadier, such piercing blue eyes,’ sighed Nellie. ‘And that’s a lovely new hold-all, Flora,’ she added, glancing up from the Daily Express for a second, ‘Louis Vuitton, isn’t it?’

‘Clever you,’ Flora stroked the dark green leather proudly. ‘Abby was so ashamed of me turning up at gigs weighed down by carrier bags of knickers that she gave it me as an early Christmas present. I can hang my black dresses up in it, and there’s room for Foxie, sponge bags, books and things.’

‘Here, let me.’ To everyone’s amazement, Carmine leapt to his feet and put the hold-all and Flora’s viola case up on the rack.

‘Come and sit here,’ he ushered her into the window-seat beside him.

‘Gosh thanks,’ stammered Flora. ‘Have a Kit-Kat.’ Then because Carmine had to play ‘The Trumpet Shall Sound’ towards the end of the evening, asked ‘Aren’t you terrified about your solo?’

Carmine shrugged.

‘Just because it’s TV I’m bound to crack a note in an embarrassing close-up, but this is a doddle compared with the solo in the B minor Mass. At the end of that, you really see stars.’ And he went on to be fascinating about trumpet music.

Carmine, in fact, was not in a good mood. He had given Cathie hell, because he actually was nervous about the solo, and because Alan Cardew, the planning officer, suddenly appeared to have won the pools, and had just whipped his wife Lindy off to the Seychelles for three weeks; then they were off again, skiing over Christmas.

Denied his mistress and uninhibited today by the endless mockery of the Celtic Mafia, Carmine decided to have a crack at Flora. He’d always fancied the snooty, upmarket little bitch.

Once the tabloids were exhausted, everyone started grumbling about foul letters from their bank manager. Barry the Bass had had to pawn his rings and medallions to get his telephone reconnected. Mary, darning socks, was fretting about paying for Christmas presents. Noriko had sold her little car and nearly died of cold walking to the coach. Old Henry couldn’t afford to get his stereo mended — life without music in a tiny bedsit was very bleak.

‘After the première of Messiah, Handel gave all the profits to the poor, which meant one hundred and fortytwo people were released from the debtors prison,’ announced Simon Painshaw.

‘Can’t see Sonny Parker doing that for us,’ sighed Candy.

‘And the hall was so packed,’ went on Simon, ‘that men were asked to leave off their swords and the ladies their hoops.’

‘Oh look,’ said Flora, ‘it’s started to snow.’

At first it didn’t settle on the roads, only laying clean sheets over the fields and crawling like a white leopard along the branches of the trees. But gradually, as the light faded, sky and snow merged, becoming the same stinging sapphire, only divided by evergreens, black trunks, branches and hedgerows that became walls as they crossed over into Gloucestershire. The coach started crackling over frozen puddles and sliding all over the place in the steep narrow lanes.

Flora wished Viking were on the coach. She’d been so upset by Rannaldini’s poaching of the RSO repertoire. Then she’d read the inscription on Viking’s cardboard tombstone. Not able to bear being hurt again, she had refused all Viking’s invitations but she still caught him smiling at her appraisingly, which always made her heart beat faster.

The snow was blanking out signposts and roadsigns. The coach drivers were all for turning back; Knickers, in a serious twist, was more terrified of George’s wrath if they didn’t arrive, and urged them on. Twenty miles from Cotchester, the snow started drifting, and they ran into blizzards. Trees reared up out of the diminishing visibility like ghosts. Climbing to the top of a hill the coach skidded into the verge and ground to a halt. Wheels whirred impotently, raising fountains of snow.

‘What do we do now?’ asked Knickers. As he put his long nose outside, his spectacles filled up with white flakes. The wind was blowing straight from Siberia.

‘You all get out and push,’ said Abby, who’d been in a car just behind them. ‘I’m not going to be beaten by that bastard Hugo.’

‘How beautiful are the feet with chilblains,’ sang Flora, wincing as she landed on iron runnels of frozen mud. As she righted herself, she was amazed to feel a coat round her shoulders, and even grateful to be offered a pair of awful driving gloves.

‘Can’t have you catching cold,’ said Carmine and, as swearing and panting they all pushed the coach, she felt his hand over hers.

‘I may be gone some time,’ said Randy, sliding off to have a pee.

Two hours and eight miles later, the coach descended into Cotchester to find completely clear roads, starry skies, and the great cathedral floodlit.

‘They’d never have believed us if we hadn’t got through,’ said Abby who’d abandoned her car.

Her orchestra, in various states of hypothermia and mutiny, gazed at her stonily. They hadn’t even the heart to boo as they passed a window in the High Street, entirely devoted to Dame Edith and the CCO’s latest recording of the Christmas Oratorio, or at huge posters everywhere advertising ‘Dame Hermione Sings Messiah’, in huge letters, with the other soloists and the RSO in tiny print underneath. Inside the packed cathedral, lit by hundreds of candles, a huge Christmas tree and television lights, the four soloists, choir, crews and audience were raring to go.

There was no time for a rehearsal. Abby went straight up onto the rostrum to explain what had happened.

‘We came through a white hell, OK? The orchestra are frozen. They’re just having something hot to eat, I hope you’ll bear with us.’

The audience were more than happy to do so, but not Dame Hermione. She was the one who kept people waiting. As the harpsichordist had already arrived from London, Hermione had been about to offer the audience an impromptu concert of her latest album, Soothe the Sad Heart, which with the television coverage would have sold an extra fifty thousand copies over Christmas.

She had upset the other three soloists by her histrionics about catching cold and her demands. Poor Alphonso, the twenty-five-stone Italian tenor, was forced to have blue drops put in his eyes, and his bald patch blacked out by the make-up girls in a howling draught because Dame Hermione had commandeered the entire vestry as a dressing-room.

Fortunately George Hungerford had missed all these hysterics because he had arrived only five minutes before the orchestra, so the first thing he heard was Dame Hermione’s deep voice saying. ‘Take me to the fans.’

The first thing Dame Hermione heard was George telling Miles that he’d have his ‘goots for garters’ if the orchestra didn’t turn up.

Surrounded by twenty blow heaters, Dame Hermione shivered from excitement rather than cold. She adored masterful men.

Meanwhile Steve Smithson charged around with his thermometer, complaining the cathedral was too cold, and that there was no proper band room, since Dame Hermione had hogged all the space.

Fortified by a glass of red wine each, paid for by Abby, and pizzas in the Bar Sinister opposite, the orchestra had perked up enough to engage in the usual argy-bargy with the television crews. There was simply not enough room on the stage to accommodate Fat Isobel and Fat Alphonso and the harpsichord, let alone having cables to trip over, mikes up your nose, lights shining in your eyes, and cameramen bossily shoving chairs and music-stands aside to give them a clear camera angle on Dame Hermione.

A BBC minion, in a fake fur coat and strawberry-pink trousers, who looked as though he ate choirboys for breakfast, sidled up to handsome Randy as he blew a few testing blasts on his trumpet.

‘Hi, Clark Gable, you playing the big solo?’

‘No, him,’ Randy jerked his sleek sandy head in Carmine’s direction.

‘Shame, you’re so much more — ‘the BBC minion ran his eyes over Randy’s body — ‘photogenic, particularly when you smile.’

‘Carmine wouldn’t like it very much.’

‘We’ll have to use green face powder to take his colour down. What are you doing after the show?’

‘Your admirer’s got an admirer,’ giggled Clare.

‘Yes, I’ve lucked out there,’ sighed Candy, tightening her G-string.

‘There’s absolutely no way I’m swapping seats with Moll — ‘Flora was now telling the BBC minion — ‘even to appear on television. Moll would kill me.’

On cue, Moll rushed up in a state of chunter.

‘There are no ladies’ toilets, so I had to squat in the gents, and someone’s written: “RSO stands for Really Shitty Orchestra” on the wall. It’s not funny, Flora. You’re to cross it out in the interval,’ she shouted to a cringing Ninion.

On came Julian, smiling broadly, fiddle aloft to relieved applause, and some barracking from the gallery.

‘Take off those dark glasses, deary,’ urged the BBC minion. ‘Looks a bit camp.’ Then, as Julian lowered them a fraction showing his red-albino eyes, said, ‘well, perhaps not.’

‘Jesus, it’s cold,’ said Bill Thackery looking at the hundreds of candles flickering in the draught.

A rustle of excitement and some cheering greeted Abby and the soloists. Dame Hermione, diamonds sparkling in the camera lights, was clad from top to toe in Rannaldini’s sleek, dark Christmas mink.

‘Ring up Animal Rights at once,’ snarled Flora.

Hermione had no competition from the contralto who looked and sang like a sheep and was eight months’ pregnant.

Having bowed to the audience, Abby thanked them once more for being so patient.

‘And I just wanna tell you guys,’ she hissed at the orchestra, ‘that the entire CCO including Hugo, are up in the gallery, waiting to boo, so flaming well play out of your boots, and don’t let the soloists drag.’

This had the desired effect. The RSO played with that brilliance and attack often engendered by rage and irritation, and, even without a rehearsal, the Cotchester Choir were infinitely superior to Peggy Parker’s screeching seagulls. Despite the icy cold of the cathedral, the sopranos led by Dame Edith’s helpmate, Monica Baddingham, had absolutely no difficulty in hitting Top A as they romped through the ‘Glory of the Lord’.

Not wanting to bump into any of his father’s friends, Marcus crept into the concert after the overture. Returning to Cotchester, which was only a few miles from his home in Penscombe, made him feel desperately homesick.

The great cathedral was as filled with memories as shadows. His father had always read the lesson at Midnight Mass, and despite being divorced had managed to have his second marriage to Taggie there, much to the rage of the bishop. It had snowed that day too, and Marcus remembered his desolation as a young boy as his father and his ravishing new stepmother took off by helicopter into the blizzard.

Alphonso, the hugely fat tenor, seemed to be singing. ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye,’ directly to him.

Marcus also noticed, because of a shortage of basses, George Hungerford had joined the choir and could be heard belting out, ‘Oonto Oos a Boy is Born’ in true Hoodersfield fashion. Marcus thought how attractive George was, so aggressively macho, compared to the bobbing Adam’s apples and waggling beards around him.

George, in fact, was very happy. That very afternoon the Ministry of the Environment had overturned Rutminster District Council’s decision and given him planning permission to cover Cowslip Hill with houses. Now he wouldn’t have to revert to his contingency plan of letting New Age Travellers onto the site at the dead of night, which normally melted any opposition.

His orchestra were also playing champion, he couldn’t have borne it if they’d let him down in front of Dame Hermione, who’d been all he’d ever dreamt of and had asked him up for a night-cap in the Rupert of the Rhine Suite at the Cotchester Hilton after the après-concert party.

The dazzling overhead lights gave a blond halo to Hermione’s glossy brown curls. Monocles glinted in the eyes of a thousand colonels and George caught his breath as she slithered out of her sleek, dark fur to reveal shoulders as smooth and white as sand dunes, rising out of a deep purple velvet dress. Looking up at the monitor, George longed to kiss the blue hollows made by her collar bones, the hairs rose at the back of his neck at the unbearable purity of her voice: ‘There were shepherds abiding in the fields.’

Because of the late start and the shortage of lavatories, it was decided to dispense with the first interval which had many of the RSO and the elderly audience crossing their legs in agony. Not so the Cotchester Chamber Orchestra in the gallery, who’d all been to a Christmas party before the concert and who kept slipping in and out with a great banging of doors throughout the second half. In delight, they also counted the number of people reading their programmes or plaques on the wall, or gently snoozing, until the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ and a good shout woke everyone up.

Moving her body like a rock star in her dark blue suit, Abby abandoned her stick and directed the orchestra and choir with clenched fists and power salutes. Backed up by Davie going berserk on his drums and by Barry and his basses, all of whom knew how to swing it, her interpretation was gloriously exhilarating, and made the lovely descending chorale of ‘The Kingdom of this World’ all the more moving, leaving the audience reeling.

Now it was time for the Bishop of Cotchester to give his little sermon, working in Honesty Insurance, whose staff had been waving banners of the logo like football supporters every time the cameras panned to the audience.

‘Awfully chic to match his ring to Dame Hermione’s dress,’ whispered Nellie, as exuding gravitas and pomposity the Bishop mounted the rostrum.

‘If we behave ourselves on this earth,’ he thundered, glaring at the CCO up in the gallery, who were guilty of even higher jinks than their Rutminster rivals, ‘it is an insurance against our going to hell.’

He then carried on, to the rippling snoring counterpoint of some drunk in the gallery, to say people should be honest in their deeds and in their words, and repeated that Honesty was the best Policy, so many times that Randy, handing his hip-flask down to Jerry the Joker, muttered that the old bugger must be getting a bloody good whack of free pension for his services. Glancing round apprehensively to see if George had overheard, Jerry was glad to see George’s anger was entirely focused on Flora, who had unearthed Foxie from under her chair and was sending Clare and Candy into fits by putting his paws over his furry ears to blot out the Bishop’s jawing.

The drunk was snoring even louder.

‘Dunno whether to put a pillow over his face or shoot him,’ said Randy, passing his hip-flask to Davie Buckle who was still recovering from his frenzied activity in the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’.

‘Shoot him and the Bishop,’ said Davie.

In fact the Bishop rabbited on for so long that Abby nodded to Julian to start tuning up. This was the moment the audience had been waiting for: the re-run of the single that had topped the pop charts, and sold over a million copies: ‘Hermione Sings Redeemer’.

Off slithered the dark fur again as Hermione rose to her feet. What a trim waist beneath those wonderful knockers, thought George, his brain misting over.

Aware that the Bishop had made them even later, Abby kept the strings and the bassoons moving on in the opening bars. But there was no way Hermione was going to be hurried.

Eyes widened, hands clasped, she smiled angelically at her swooning public.

‘I know that my Redeemer leeveth,’ rang out joyfully on the arctic, uncentrally heated air, and the audience burst into a round of applause as if they were listening to Frank Sinatra.

Hermione put up a white hand to hush them: ‘Thank you, thank you, good people of Cotchester. I’m so happy to be in your lovely city again. From the beginning, Abigail.’

Abby gritted her teeth.

Hermione’s voice could crack glasses. Unfortunately this second time around it woke up the drunk in the gallery, who, taking a swig from his bottle of Southern Comfort decided to sing along.

‘I know that moy Redeemer leeeeeveth,’ he caterwauled, wickedly mimicking Hermione, as he clasped his hands, composed his slack mouth in a perfect O, lengthened all his Es, and opened his bloodshot little eyes as far as they would go.

‘Oh bliss, there is a God,’ muttered Flora.

‘And though worms deestroy theese body,’ sang Hermione, who’d gone bright red from embarrassment and trying to drown him.

‘And though worms deestroy theeese bod-ee,’ quavered the drunk, to a crescendo of furious hissing from a thousand apoplectic colonels. (Gentlemen should have been allowed to wear swords.)

Unfortunately Hermione had many bars of rest in the aria for the drunk to fill in.

‘I know,’ he began again, missing top E with a mighty screech.

Monica Baddingham, in the choir, strained her eyes to see if — horrors — he was one of Dame Edith’s musicians in disguise.

Looking down, Abby saw that the RSO had corpsed. Neither Jerry the Joker, nor Solemn Steve could keep their lips round their reeds. The strings, even Julian, were hunched over their music, to hide their frantically shaking shoulders. Randy, Carmine and Davie were going even redder in the face trying not to laugh, Flora wasn’t even trying. Foxie was conducting again, with gracious sweeps and bows to Candy and Clare who were stuffing handkerchiefs into their mouths, and to Fat Isobel who was clutching her massive sides.

I’ll kill that drunk and that minx after the concert, raged George. Hemmed in by beards and Adam’s apples he was in anguish.

‘In my flesh shall I see God,’ screeched the drunk, taking another swig. Up in the gallery the CCO were in ecstasy.

‘Throw him out,’ shouted their First Bassoon.

‘Yesh, throw him out,’ agreed the Second Horn.

‘No,’ yelled the First Trumpet, who’d drunk even more whisky. ‘Throw him down, he might kill a fiddler.’

A gale of laughter swept the gallery.

Hugo, however, was watching Abby’s rigid shoulders and her clenched fist on her baton.

‘Look at L’Appassionata,’ he murmured to his First Horn, ‘she’s going to flip.’

As Hermione hit top G with an almighty squawk, George left his seat, punching fellow basses out of the way, and Abby stopped the orchestra and swung round.

The fury in her blazing yellow eyes was so palpable, many of the audience felt they had been burnt by lightning and afterwards swore that all the candles round the cathedral dimmed before flickering back into life.

‘Just pack it in, right,’ yelled Abby.

‘And though worms deestroy theese body,’ warbled the drunk, waving his bottle at her.

Abby’s voice rose: ‘I said pack it in. We’ve driven through snow and blizzard this evening to play to you, and Dame Hermione and the other soloists have flown thousands of miles to sing. If you don’t get that asshole out of here we won’t play another note.’

There was a stunned, appalled pause, as a thousand deaf-aids were switched up to discover if they had heard right.

Then the lurking Press went beserk, simultaneously trying to photograph Abby and Hermione and the drunk as he was noisily evicted.

Dame Hermione, who knew how to milk a situation, cast down her eyes. Abby reached across the pregnant alto and put a comforting hand on her white shaking shoulder.

‘I’m sorry, let’s do it again. We’ll skip the introduction, five bars after eleven, and one-’

Hermione rose to the occasion, a woman of sorrows, eyes brimming with tears, moved for once by genuine grief at her own humiliation. At the end the audience cheered her to the shadowy rafters.

As she lumbered off the stage down into the side-aisle, one of her high heels fell down the soi-disant central-heating grill, depositing her into the waiting arms of George Hungerford. Her breasts were so soft, it was like catching a giant pillow.

‘Dame Hermione, I’m bluddy proud of you,’ said George, offering her the remains of Randy’s hip-flask.

THIRTY-NINE

The concert was followed by a splendid party at Dame Edith’s house in the Close. Normally the musicians would have been excluded from such a bash, but Dame Edith, who’d always voted Labour, felt that after such a polar trek, they deserved a treat. The coaches would leave in half an hour, which gave everyone time for a bite and several drinks. A route avoiding snow had been charted. They’d be home by two.

Dame Edith lived in a shabbily beautiful Jacobean house on lots of floors, using all her awards as doorstops. The dark William Morris walls were covered with sixty years of musical mementoes. Monica Baddingham had added her Stubbs, her Herrings, her sporting prints, her embroidered cushions to the household, and three yellow labrador bitches who had greatly enhanced the life of Tippett, Dame Edith’s pug.

Tippett now sat snuffling beside Dame Edith, who had changed into a burgundy-red smoking-jacket to welcome her guests with a slap on the back.

‘Well done, splendid concert, great success. Coats upstairs, booze to the left, coq au vin and bombe surprise in the kitchen. Monica made them — ’ she smiled fondly at Lady Baddingham, who was brandishing champagne bottles — ‘so they must be bloody good.’

‘Do you think they both sleep in here?’ panted Flora as she plonked her viola case and her new Louis Vuitton on Edith’s massive four-poster.

‘I guess so,’ Marcus blushed slightly. ‘The four dog-baskets are all in here.’

‘Golly,’ giggled Flora, ‘we are seeing life. That Augustus John must be of Edith when she was a young boy. D’you think Abby’s going to be in awful trouble over that drunk?’

‘I thought she was wonderful,’ said Marcus. ‘Christ knows where it would have ended if she hadn’t gone ballistic.’

Downstairs Dame Edith was entirely in agreement.

‘Can’t think why everyone’s making such a fuss,’ she was telling a tight-lipped Miles, the Bishop and a hovering Gwynneth and Gilbert, who were already filling their faces from overloaded plates.

‘Done just the same myself,’ continued Edith, flicking cigar ash into the fire. ‘Anyway, what’s wrong with the word “asshole”?’

Miles blanched.

‘In a House of God, Edith?’ asked the Bishop plaintively.

‘Very appropriate,’ said Edith with a guffaw. ‘Assholes seem to be the only thing you bishops are interested in these days, judging by the papers.’

The Bishop turned as purple as the ring on his cherished white hand, but being a very greedy man, he was not prepared to storm out until he’d dined, so merely satisfied himself with: ‘You go too far, Edith.’

‘It wasn’t Abby’s church,’ said Flora, joining the group to Miles’s fury. ‘She’s Jewish, and people use the word “asshole” all the time in America — it just means idiot. Anyway,’ she ploughed on ignoring the shocked faces, ‘Abby’s in excellent company. Handel used to swear in four languages at anyone, even royalty, who chatted in rehearsals, and he used to throw tiresome singers out of the window, although he’d have been pushed to evict Alphonso.’

‘Well said,’ Dame Edith gave a shout of laughter, then linking her arm through Flora’s led her towards the kitchen. ‘Come and have some grub. Like your flowered leggings, just like the Prima Vera.’ Then, lowering her voice, whispered, ‘How’s Marcus? Monica and I are awfully worried about the rift with Rupert and Taggie; poor boy feels things so deeply.’

‘The best thing you could do,’ said Flora, ‘is to get him some work.’

As soon as Dame Edith was out of earshot, Miles, guzzling Gwynneth and Gilbert, and the Bishop drew together for an indignation meeting.

‘Abigail’s got to be stopped, she can’t go on behaving like a yobbo. The “Hallelujah Chorus” sounded like rock music,’ said Miles fastidiously.

‘And that young woman Flora’s just as bad,’ sniffed Gwynneth.

Oblivious of the furore she had triggered off, Abby was thrilled to have been sought out by Monica Baddingham and the great Declan O’Hara, who was just to die for, to say how well she had done. She was livid, however, when she overheard several CCO players saying how tremendously the RSO had been improved by Julian.

‘It’s the great leader, of course, that makes a great orchestra,’ said Hugo, smiling coldly at Abby.

He was obviously still festering over his yellow cords. Then he turned to Gwynneth, who looked as though she had a couple of used cars hanging from her ears.

‘Lovely earrings, Gwynneth. Can I get you some bombe surprise? I know how you like desserts.’

‘I thought I’d have seconds of the coq first,’ simpered Gwynneth.

‘Nearest she’ll get to cock in this house,’ murmured Randy to Candy. ‘I’m surprised they’re not serving vibrator au vin.’

Hugo, who, unlike most of the RSO, realized how crucial it was to suck up to the Arts Council, took Gwynneth’s plate.

‘You’re so caring, Hugo,’ Gwynneth edged towards him. ‘What did you really think of Rosen’s performance?’

Hugo shrugged. ‘Not a lot. The jazzing up of the “Hallelujah Chorus” was terribly vulgar. George Frederick would have loathed it, and she’s such a drama queen.’

‘My sentiments entirely. How far exactly is Rutminster from Cotchester?’

‘Two score miles and ten,’ said Hugo. ‘And the RSO nearly didn’t get there by candlelight.’

‘One wonders,’ mused Gwynneth, ‘whether we really need two orchestras in the area.’

‘My sentiments even more entirely,’ said Hugo.

There was only warmth and sincerity in Hugo’s eyes as he forced himself to gaze into her lard-like face. Without flinching he accepted the pressure of her shapeless body. ‘I’ll get you some more coq, Gwynnie.’

Turning, he tripped over a large labrador and nearly deposited Gwynneth’s chicken bones into Alphonso’s capacious lap.

Alphonso, who was taking up seven-eights of the window-seat, didn’t flinch either.

‘I hop,’ he was telling Nellie, ‘that you will come to my suite for a night-hat.’

George, who’d been buttonholed for far too long, grabbed Abby as she passed.

‘Have a word with Gilbert, I know he wants to discuss the concert.’

Shoving them together to their mutual distaste, he belted off to find Dame Hermione. In his car on the way over, she had sung: ‘I’m a little lamb that’s lost in the wood’. George had never looked forward to a night-cap more in his life.

The heroine of the evening was now holding court on a frayed chaise-longue to a circle of admirers, many of them Press.

‘I just thought, poor fellow, poor fellow, he must be so terribly unhappy. Anyone that dependent on drink needs help.’

‘You’re so compassionate, Dame Hermione,’ gushed Gwynneth.

‘Have some fizz,’ said Monica Baddingham, waving a bottle.

Everyone put their hands over their glasses to demonstrate their lack of dependency.

‘I just wanted to congratulate you on your Fanny Cycle,’ went on Gwynneth reverently, ‘and Rannaldini has never conducted better.’

‘How is Rannaldini?’ asked a man from The Times idly.

Flora, on her way to the 100, stopped in her tracks.

‘Oh, full of beans,’ said Hermione heartily, her small hand creeping surreptitiously into George’s big one.

‘How’s his new marriage?’ asked the Guardian.

‘Excellent,’ said Hermione, her eyes suddenly twinkling. ‘I sometimes think he married her for her packing.’

Flora groaned and ran upstairs. She was desperately tired and near to tears. After admiring the famous musicians, including Rannaldini in arctic profile framed on the wall of Edith’s bathroom, she unlocked the door and came out slap into Carmine.

‘You played brilliantly tonight,’ she stammered, conscious of the lurking menace of the man. ‘I wish all the brass section had been at the concert to hear you.’

Edging along the wall towards the stairs, she was stopped by the iron bar of his arm.

‘Give us a kiss, then.’

Avoiding a vile sour waft of vinous breath which must have corked inside him, Flora pecked him on the cheek. The next moment, Carmine had grabbed her hair, yanking her head back, forcing his sneering mouth on hers with a clash of teeth, scratching her with his horrible moustache. As she writhed with the strength of utter revulsion, his other hand dived under her dark blue jersey, pinching her breasts till she screamed.

‘You bloody little bra-less prick-tease.’

‘Lemme go.’ Flora was desperately trying to knee him in the balls, when a voice said: ‘Ahem. I spy a strugglin’ musician.’

‘Fuck off,’ snarled Carmine, but his grip eased.

Wriggling away, Flora went slap into the scented, medallion-hung bulk of Jack Rodway the receiver.

‘Oh, thank God.’

‘You OK?’

Flora nodded. ‘No fool like a bold fool,’ she said shakily.

Jack turned on Carmine.

‘If you ever lay a finger on this young lidy again, I’ll get George’s boys on you, before he fires you.’

Swearing, snarling, Carmine lurched off upstairs.

Flora was shaking uncontrollably.

‘Poor li-el fing.’ Jack’s arms closed around her. ‘Come and have a jar at the Bar Sinister.’

Out of the landing window, Flora could see musicians streaming out to the waiting coach.

‘I gotta go.’

‘I’ll run you home later, it’s no distance at night. I’ve thought a lot about you, Flora.’

‘My things are still on Edith’s bed.’ Flora shivered, Carmine was still up there somewhere. ‘There’s my leather jacket, and a viola case with my name on, and a green Louis Vuitton bag.’

‘I’ll get them,’ said Jackie.

‘And you might torch Dim Hermione’s fur coat at the same time.’

In the hall, Flora met a happier-looking Marcus.

‘Dame Edith’s just introduced me to George, he was really nice this time.’

Flora looked old-fashioned. ‘Must want something. Look, I’m not coming on the coach — can you or Abby feed the cats if you get home before me?’

‘I shouldn’t be doing this,’ grumbled Flora as Jack aimed the remote control to open huge electric gates. ‘What happens if your wife rolls up?’

‘She’s in Italy,’ said Jack.

They seemed to get upstairs to the bedroom awfully quickly.

‘I’m glad you turned up at the party,’ gabbled Flora. ‘Things were a little flat, before Carmine tried to rape me.’

‘I’ll set you up in a little flat,’ Jack guided her into a bedroom out of a Laura Ashley catalogue.

‘I ought to clean my teeth,’ said Flora, as she collapsed onto a daisy-strewn counterpane. ‘I better fetch my smart new bag to match such a smart bedroom.’

‘Use my toothbrush,’ said Jack, pulling her to her feet. ‘Use anyfing in the bathroom, most of all, use me.’

Flora was woken by Jack marching in with black coffee, croissants and a large jug of Buck’s Fizz.

‘You’re a seriously nice man.’

Jack smirked.

‘And that is a really pretty view.’ Flora reared up in bed to admire a wood and white houses nesting in skewbald hills. People were already tobogganing. ‘And a lovely little village.’

‘Shame the bloody bells wike us up at twenty to eleven every Sunday morning.’

‘Help. Is that the time?’

‘You were very tired. I wish I could still crash out like that.’

Jack was wearing a white towelling dressing-gown and was obviously poised for a replay. He looked much older in daylight with his thatched hair pushed off his lined forehead.

‘Coincidence you going to Verona,’ he went on. ‘Have a Crusoe.’

Croissant’s the one word that always trips them up, Flora was appalled to find herself thinking, and said hastily, ‘I’ve never been to Verona.’

‘Come on, the label’s on your smart ‘old-all.’

Flora was downstairs in a flash. In the Louis Vuitton bag with the Verona label, she found several toots of cocaine, two very hard-porn mags, a year’s supply of condoms, ten grand in cash, some grey silk pyjamas, voluminous enough to make a parachute, Alphonso’s tails, his passport and his tickets to Verona on a plane that had left at eight o’clock that morning.

Flora went beserk.

‘He’s got Foxie,’ she sobbed. ‘I can’t move without Foxie, he’s been with me since I was a baby.’

She was on to Woodbine Cottage in even more of a flash.

‘Dirty stop-out,’ were Abby’s first words.

‘I’ve lost Foxie, and my lovely new case.’

It was several seconds before Abby could make herself heard.

‘It’s OK, Nellie’s got them.’

‘How on earth?’

‘She went back to the Cotchester Hilton with Alphonso.’

‘Omigod.’

Abby couldn’t stop laughing.

‘Nellie said Alphonso burrowed in his case for a line and a condom and discovered Foxie.’

‘Condomingo,’ said Flora, who was reeling with relief. ‘Poor Foxie, where’s he now?’

‘Alphonso gave him and your case to George.’

‘Oh de-ah,’ said Flora wearily, ‘he’s not going to be very happy. I’ve got Alphonso’s case here.’

George had not been able to keep his rendezvous with Dame Hermione. A man of sorrows, acquainted with a whole load of grief, he had instead spent the night with an increasingly hysterical Alphonso, who refused to let him call the police, because of the contents of the case, but insisted George ring every member of the orchestra, which was difficult when the snow had brought down so many telephone lines, to try and locate its whereabouts.

George really roared down the telephone at Flora.

‘Where the fuck have you been? Alphonso’s threatening to sue the orchestra, unless we get his case back and him on the evening plane. He’s got to fly to the States in the morning. I’ll send the helicopter for the case at once. Where are you?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘Then you’re fired.’

Flora put a sweating hand over the receiver.

‘Can you lend me the money for a taxi back to Rutminster?’

Grim-faced, Jack seized the telephone.

‘George, it’s Jack, Jack Rodway, Flora’s wiv me.’ Then, interrupting the torrent of abuse, snapped, ‘I don’t want the fuzz involved, Janice’d do her nut, and having seen the contents of Alphonso’s case, I can see why he don’t either. I’ll shunt Flora over to you as quick as possible.’

All Jack’s bonhomie had evaporated. He couldn’t wait to get Flora out of the house.

Beside Foxie, George had found a black dress, a pair of shoes, a sponge bag and the Selected Poems of Robert Browning, which he was flipping through, when Flora, very pale but defiant, arrived at his office.

‘How sad and bad and mad it was -

But then, how it was sweet,’ quoted George, throwing the book across the huge polished table. ‘Pretty sad, bad and mad, for a girl of your age to go to bed with a middle-aged roué like Jack Rodway.’

Watching Flora dive on Foxie, kissing him thankfully, he reflected bitterly on his missed night-cap with Hermione, who was off round the world already, who might have soothed his sad heart. He didn’t know if he would ever meet her again.

‘You’ll have to pay for Alphonso’s air ticket,’ he said harshly.

Flora was gathering up the rest of her belongings and chucking them into her case.

‘I’ll have to consult my lawyer,’ she said haughtily. ‘George Carman’s a friend of my mother’s.’

‘I’ll dock it off your salary then.’

‘I must have picked up Alphonso’s bag in the cathedral. It was all your fault — there was no band room for safe keeping, everything was jumbled together. I’m going to talk to Steve.’

Appealed to, the union decided management was in the wrong and Flora didn’t have to pay up, but Steve shook his head.

‘George hates anyone getting the better of him, Flora. I’m afraid you’re a marked woman from now on.’

FORTY

The RSO were highly amused by the annexing both of Jack Rodway and Alphonso’s case, and sang, ‘Pack up your troubles in a new kit bag,’ each time an increasingly irritated Flora came into the hall.

Although secretly delighted that Flora had got off with someone other than Viking, Abby was currently far more preoccupied with the recording of Rachel’s Requiem. It was her first CD as a conductor and for the RSO, and she was determined to trounce the CCO in next October’s Gramophone Awards if it killed her. Thank God, Boris was too immersed in King Lear to come down and interfere.

‘I leave it in your capable fingers,’ he told Abby. ‘Today I write vonderful aria: “Blow vind and crack your chicks.”’

Both, however, reckoned without the wrath of Piggy Porker. She was not going to put one hundred thousand pounds into the RSO centenary year, starting on 1 January, and provide half the money for the Requiem and Sonny’s Interruption if a blasphemer was at the helm. Miles, Canon Airlie and Serena Woodward, now known as ‘Princess Grace of Megagram’, who was producing the record, all backed her up, and so did George, when he saw the cash sum involved. Boris must conduct the Requiem he had written. He was also cheap because he liked to keep the adrenalin going by recording pieces straight through without any retakes as though they were live, so there were never any overtime problems.

They had, however, all reckoned without Julian who, in a midnight meeting, threatened to resign if Abby were supplanted, and without Boris, who flatly refused to co-operate.

‘Fuck off Parson from Portlock,’ he shouted when Miles rang, ‘Eef I break off now, I will lose Lear; all the characters, all the music vill slip away, it is best theeng I ever write. I try to forget Rachel and Requiem. Anyway I can’t do this to Abby who is a good friend.’

Nor did he want hassle from Astrid, who was wildly jealous of Abby, Rachel and anything to do with Rutminster.

‘Are you prepared to pay back your advance, if the record is pulled?’ asked Miles coldly.

Boris, who had just bought a little Polo for Astrid, and had the cheque bounced on him, said he was not.

‘You’ve got two days to mug up on the Requiem,’ ordered Miles. ‘And please catch a train on Sunday night, so you’ll be on time on Monday morning.’

Instead Boris caught an early train on Monday morning. It was a tedious union rule that no more than twenty minutes of music could be recorded in a three-hour session. But if he could finish the Requiem which lasted an hour in a day, the RSO would still get paid for a three-hour session tomorrow morning, and could go Christmas shopping or have a lie-in instead, and he could belt back to Astrid on a fast train this evening.

Passengers on the 7.05 to Rutminster were amazed to see the romantic-looking man with the upended Beethoven hair singing along to his frantic scribbling, covering an entire table for four with his papers.

‘With a Hey Ho, the vind and the rain,’ sang Boris.

He hadn’t bothered to look at the Requiem, and became so immersed in a possible baritone aria: ‘As flies to vanton boys, are we to the gods,’ that he forgot to get off at Rutminster, and only arrived at the recording studios, situated in a basement in the High Street, at quarter-past eleven.

Miles, who had to pay for the taxi, was hopping.

‘Who produce Requiem?’ Boris asked him sulkily.

‘Serena Westwood. She’s been waiting for you since half-past nine.’

Miles might well have poured petrol all over a smouldering Boris, who loathed being bossed about by women. Serena was as smilingly serene as her name, but Boris was convinced a barracuda lurked beneath her steel-grey wool dress. Abby at least was on the side of music and she and Boris could swear at each other in Russian.

Serena, who was now sitting in the control-room, had been immersed in the score all weekend. She had taken the precaution of providing paper cups in case Boris started smashing things. In front of her, at a mixing desk like a vast switchboard and being paid a fortune by the hour, sat Sammy, the recording engineer. Through a glass panel, they could both see a forest of microphones like silver-birch saplings. Around these were grouped the RSO, swelled today by numerous extras, who also had to be paid. Except for Hilary who was ostentatiously reading Villette, they had all done the crossword and read the latest instalment in the Royal Soap in their own and each other’s papers.

To irritate Flora, the Celtic Mafia were now exchanging viola jokes.

‘What’s the definition of a lady?’

‘Go on, Viking.’

‘A woman who can play the viola but doesn’t.’

‘Ha, ha, ha, ha.’

‘Once upon a time, Princess Diana met a frog,’ went on Viking. ‘The frog said, “If you give me a big kiss, ma’am, I’ll turn into a handsome viola player.” So Princess Diana put him in her pocket. “Whaddja do that for,” protested the frog. “You’ll be more use to me as a talking frog,” said Princess Diana.’

‘Oh, shut up,’ snarled Flora, over the howls of mirth.

Everything irritated her at the moment.

Over her right shoulder she was constantly aware of Viking’s coldness since she’d slept with Jack, and over her left she was equally conscious of Carmine’s venomous animosity.

It was also such a long time since the RSO had made a record, that for many of the players: Candy, Clare, Lincoln, Viking’s Fifth Horn, Jenny, Cherub, Flora and Noriko, this was a first experience, and they were all terrified. Recordings were for ever. Every wrong note, dropped mouthpiece or rustled page would be picked up.

The long wait was telling on everyone’s nerves, particularly as Julian, good as his word, had refused to participate without Abby, and had swept Luisa and the children off to a pantomime in London. Bill Thackery, although thrilled to have this big chance to lead the orchestra, couldn’t, as Viking pointed out, lead the winning dog up to get the obedience championship at Cruft’s.

Wandering into the studio, Boris apologized for being late, paused to change a couple of bars of ‘Blow Vind’, opened the score of the Requiem, then remembering he hadn’t called Astrid picked up the telephone on the rostrum and found himself connected to Serena.

‘We’re all waiting, Mr Levitsky,’ she said icily.

‘Vun moment,’ Boris shot out to the call-box in the passage.

He’d fix the RSO management for dragging him away in the middle of Lear, and there was his old enemy Viking reading the Racing Post and ringing his bookmaker. Thank God he’d given ‘Rachel’s Lament’ to Cathie Jones, although she wouldn’t be needed until tomorrow.

The red light was on, shining through the mist of cigarette smoke like a setting September sun.

‘The tape’s started, Boris,’ said Serena, on the talk-back that could be heard by the whole studio. She would only use the telephone on the rostrum for private abuse.

Raising his stick, Boris noticed how many bows and instruments were trembling and smiled reassuringly.

‘You are nervous, don’t be, forget the microphones, we are making music. Eef we make few mistakes it doesn’t matter.’

‘No-one will notice anyway,’ muttered Old Henry who loathed contemporary music.

How lovely to have Boris back, after Abby’s relentless exactitude, thought the RSO fondly. Boris always kept them on their toes; they never knew what he would do next.

Unfortunately this time Boris didn’t know either. He had totally underestimated the terrifying complexities of a work that suddenly seemed to have been written long ago by someone else. The first tutti was completely haywire, followed by two bars of silence, when the orchestra didn’t come in at all, except for a great tummy-rumble from Candy who’d been too nervous to have any breakfast, and who went bright scarlet, which sent all the rank-and-file viola players into fits of giggles.

This was followed by a dreadful crunch when Boris by mistake cued the horns into head-on collision with the trombones totally drowning a flute duet.

‘I don’t know what happened then,’ said Juno in a flustered voice, ‘I looked up at Boris.’

‘That was your first mistake,’ said Peter Plumpton grimly.

Serena glared down at the black tangle of notes like a front on the weather map, and picked up the telephone.

‘Let’s start again.’

But it was no better. Boris didn’t know when to bring anyone in, seemed unaware of colour, dynamics or tempo and was constantly behind the beat.

As his gestures grew wilder and more panicky, the level metres in the control-room kept bouncing off the top, leaving nothing in reserve for any big crescendo coming up.

Without Abby to hold it together or, at least, Julian to bring in other section leaders with great nods, the piece collapsed. Useless take followed utterly useless take.

‘Despite what anyone says,’ murmured Simon Painshaw to Ninion, ‘there is a difference between intended and unintended cacophony.’

The telephone rang constantly.

‘Serena’s trying to make a date with you, Boris,’ shouted Dixie, ‘very soft beds in the Old Bell.’

Boris growled back in Russian and retreated to the Old Bell for succour. He was very drunk when he returned after the break, but because the RSO had been taught the Requiem painstakingly by Abby, they struggled on to the end of ‘Dies Irae’.

‘Why isn’t Abby conducting this?’ grumbled Viking. ‘At this rate, we’ll be here till Boxing Day.’

Glumly the musicians watched the recording engineer dart in and shift a microphone towards Bill Thackery for the solo with which Julian had reduced everyone to tears at the première. It had been much too difficult for Lionel, and should have completely defeated Bill Thackery. But smilingly aware of opportunity knocking, he ploughed on, sublimely unaware that he sounded as though he was chainsawing through his grandmother’s wardrobe with Granny shrieking inside. Boris, however, was too drunk to notice.

In the lunch-hour, Francis the Good Loser, who had moved up to co-leader for the day and who had the sweetest nature in the orchestra, for once lost his temper.

‘How dare that tone-deaf nerd butcher such a beautiful solo?’ he stormed to Eldred, who cautiously agreed that Bill could have done with a drop of oil.

Alas the ‘tone-deaf nerd’ overheard them, retreated to the leader’s room in high dudgeon, and had to be coaxed out by Miles and Hilary. ‘Take no notice, Bill.’

‘Don’t listen to two such disgusting slobs.’

‘They’ve upset Bill, the nicest man in the orchestra,’ said Hilary as she flounced back to her seat.

‘And the worst bloody player,’ said Randy.

Serena was going up the wall, too. She had spent the lunch-hour in despair and on her mobile. She had a hundred other projects to look after and a small daughter, whom she’d been hoping to take to Toad of Toad Hall on Wednesday. Serena was ambitious. Apart from the cost of paying the musicians for extra sessions, she couldn’t afford to make a lousy record. They’d be lucky if they got five minutes in the can today.

Boris, drinking brandy out of a paper cup, was now slumped on one of the sleep-inducing squashy leather sofas at the back of the control-room. Damp patches met across the back of his dark red shirt. He was Lear on the blasted heath being ‘pussy-vipped’ by the elements.

‘I think because of Rachel’s death I block out Requiem.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Serena crossly, ‘you haven’t bothered to learn it. Now get back and finish this session.’

Miles was shuddering with disapproval. Knickers was very, very down. It would totally knock his budget on the head if he had to call in all those extras for additional sessions. How would they ever again be able to afford exciting projects like Fidelio and Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand to fire the public’s imagination.

Half an hour from the end of the afternoon, the RSO limped to the end of the ‘Benedictus’, and the section leaders crowded wearily into the control-room to listen to the play-back. Eldred, already suicidal at the prospect of a wifeless Christmas, was white and shaking because he hated rows. Dimitri, Simon and Peter Plumpton sat listening with heads bowed because they hated bad playing. Dixie and Carmine just hated each other. Jerry the Joker looked at Serena’s legs. Davie Buckle and Barry the Bass who had played jazz all night were asleep.

El Creepo edged along the squashy sofa, so his right-hand fingers folded round his upper arm could rub against the more exciting squashiness of Mary’s pretty right breast. A totally oblivious Mary was worrying what food shops would still be open, and if she sold her pearls would she get enough to pay the telephone bill and buy a tricycle for Justin for Christmas. Bill Thackery, radiating decency and solidarity, had quite recovered from his mini-tantrum. Blissful to be centre stage for once, he thought nothing had ever sounded more lovely than his dreadful solo.

‘Bill’s all right in the higher register where only bats can hear him,’ muttered Viking to Tommy Stainforth, Principal Percussion.

Slumped against the parquet wall, reading a rave review in Gramophone of his Strauss concerto, Viking looked shattered, his blond mane lank and separating. He had to drive to Bristol to play Mozart’s Fourth Horn Concerto that evening. Through the glass panel he could see Flora. Having boasted he would pick her off, he had been enraged to be pipped by Jack Rodway. Look at her now, flipping through Clare’s copy of Tatler, yacking away to Cherub, Noriko and Candy, making them all laugh, always the focus of bloody attention.

Serena was making notes at her desk.

‘I’ll buy that if you will, Boris,’ she said, more out of despair.

Boris, who was sobering up, shook his head. ‘“Benedictus” is too pretty, too charming.’

‘Could have fooled me,’ muttered Dixie.

‘Those crochets are too long,’ agreed Dimitri. ‘The melody seduce me.’

‘I screw up this tape,’ said Boris grandiosely, ‘we vill do it again, have this von on me.’

‘Well, step on it,’ said Serena. ‘We’ve got fifteen minutes to go before we’re into overtime.’

Serena was passionately relieved when George stalked in just back from Manchester. Having been briefed by Miles, he immediately asked for a score. His face grew grimmer as once again Boris and the ‘Benedictus’ drew to its utterly biteless conclusion. Not a chord or a scale was together.

‘Good thing this glass is bullet-proof,’ said Serena bleakly, ‘We should have stuck with L’Appassionata.’

‘Don’t tell her, she’ll be even more impossible.’

‘At this rate, we’ll go into a second week. If he doesn’t get his act together tomorrow, we’ll have to reschedule or pull the whole thing.’

For a second they gazed at each other; they had planned a leisurely dinner leading to other things.

George sighed. ‘I’ll take him home and force-feed him the score.’ He put a rough hand on hers, ‘There’ll be oother occasions.’

‘Not if the RSO go on playing like this. See you all tomorrow at nine forty-five,’ she called over the talk-back.

Like prisoners in the dungeons of Fidelio the musicians shambled out, frustrated, tired and blaming Boris.

‘Poor Boris,’ protested Noriko. ‘He is very sad to be dragged away from King Rear.’

‘Viking’s King Rear’, said Nellie wistfully, ‘always forcing that gorgeous ass into the tightest jeans.’

A swaying Boris was hijacked on the way out. After initial pleasantries, George asked him where he was staying.

‘Voodbine Cottage, Abby and Flora invite me.’

‘Uh-uh,’ George grabbed Boris’s arm, ‘you’re cooming home with me. You’re going to sober oop, and spend the night with the score instead of one of those two scroobers.’

Unfortunately he hadn’t seen Flora who was lurking in the shadows. She was in total despair, as she remembered the excitement with which they had all worked to finish the Requiem in the summer.

‘I’m not a scrubber,’ she said furiously. ‘If you hadn’t junked Abby, none of this would have happened,’ and fled into the icy night.

Having been forced to drink four Alka-Seltzers before being put straight to bed, Boris slept for nine hours. George woke him at five, giving him black coffee and four hours on the Requiem.

By this time Boris was ready for a huge fry-up, including fried bread spread with Oxford Marmalade.

‘Public-school habit I peek up from Flora.’

‘My cross,’ said George bleakly.

‘Is excellent girl,’ protested Boris.

‘You’ve been seduced by a not particularly pretty face,’ snapped George.

‘Is Cordelia in Lear, “so young, my lord, and true”. My God — ’ Boris clapped his hand to his forehead in horror — ‘vere is my Lear manuscript, three month’s vork, I am ruined.’

‘Sit down.’ George poured Boris another cup of coffee. ‘I put it in the office safe.’

Boris slumped back in his chair.

‘You are horrible, but very good guy. You save vork of art.’

George made sure Boris arrived at the studios in good time. They were greeted by a smirking shifty-eyed Carmine. Cathie had flu, and couldn’t play ‘Rachel’s Lament’ in the ‘Libera Me’. Knickers was tearing the remains of his red hair out. Where would he find a cor anglais player in Christmas week at five minutes’ notice?

‘Cathie could have bloody rung.’

Miss Parrott leapt to Cathie’s defence.

‘That bug going round knocks you for six.’

‘So does that bugger,’ said an anguished Blue, who hadn’t slept for two nights with excitement at the prospect of seeing Cathie and who had turned up in his best blue shirt. ‘I know he’s blacked Cathie’s eye or worse. I’m going round there.’

‘Don’t,’ hissed Viking, ‘the bastard will notice you’re missing. Lindy Cardew has just returned brown as a berry from the Seychelles, courtesy no doubt of George Hungerford. On Friday she and the planning officer are off again to Gstaad. Carmine doesn’t want Cathie around cramping his style.’

Nicholas, Miles, George, Serena and Boris were in a despairing huddle around the rostrum

‘We’ll have to record the “Libera Me” at a later date,’ said Boris.

‘The only solution,’ said Flora strolling up to them, ‘is for Viking to play the solo.’

‘The hell I will,’ Viking didn’t look up from Classical Music, ‘Boris didn’t want me in the first place.’

‘That is untrue,’ said Boris outraged, ‘I offer it to heem once.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, bury your pride, both of you,’ said Flora. ‘You bloody well owe it to us, Boris, for wasting all our times yesterday.’

‘Ahem,’ George cleared his throat, ‘I would like to remind you,’ he told Flora tartly, ‘that until otherwise stated I am nominally in charge of this orchestra.’

‘Well, tell them not to be so pigheaded.’

‘I don’t ’ave French ’orn version,’ said Boris sullenly.

‘I do,’ said Flora, ‘I kept it in my locker. One never knows when these things might come in useless, as you’re obviously all opposed to the idea.’

‘Go and get it,’ said George.

‘It’s only got a bass accompaniment,’ said Serena, as they all pored over the Sellotaped-together page. ‘You and Barry can practise it in the lunch-hour, Viking.’

‘I’m busy,’ said Viking haughtily, ‘I’ll sight-read it.’

Flora’s pleasure in having secured him the solo evaporated at his lack of enthusiasm. Battling with an icy wind in the High Street on her way to send flowers to Cathie Jones, she felt even worse. A BMW screamed to a halt and Viking leapt out. He had put on a tie and had brushed his hair. For a blissful moment, Flora thought he was stopping to thank her; instead he belted into the florists, bought every freesia in the place and belted out again.

Flora started to cry. She ached all over. No-one ever said, ‘Well done, violas’. She was fed up and lonely. She hated George for calling her a scrubber and Viking for bombarding beauties with freesias. Even worse was the thought of Christmas, with all its jollity and loving kindness. She would have to go home to warring parents and a place that reminded her only of Rannaldini.

The rest of the RSO had a much better day. Boris was back on form conducting with his old fire and inspiration. They worked fast polishing off the ‘Agnus Dei’, the ‘Lux Aeterna’ and a vastly improved ‘Benedictus’.

It was time for ‘Rachel’s Lament’.

‘Aren’t you nervous?’ said Cherub admiringly.

Viking shook his head. He had the big-match temperament, that needed adrenalin pumping through his veins to make him perform at his best. Throwing his paper cup of coffee at the waste-paper basket and missing, he picked up his horn. He had removed his tie and jacket. His casket of earth glinted in the V of his dark blue shirt which had escaped from his jeans. Two days in an airless, ill-lit studio had taken their toll. The pale skin fell away from his high cheek-bones, the lines were deeply etched round the bruised mouth, the slitty eyes had disappeared into black shadows.

Too much sex at lunch-time, thought Flora sourly.

I must sign him up, sighed Serena. He’d just have to stand there and smoulder.

Cathie’s version of ‘Rachel’s Lament’ had been poignant, haunting, coming from the depth of her sadness, the last cry of the dying swan. Viking curdled the blood, the rising fourths and fifths singing out, probing, incessant, insistent, almost unbearably raw and primitive. One great player saluting the departure of another.

Miles, Nicholas, George, Miss Priddock holding John Drummond, even Harry Hopcraft, the financial director, crowded into the control-room to listen. All sat spellbound. Only Viking and Julian had that ability at five o’clock on a mean, grey afternoon to bring tears spurting out of the weariest eyes.

Boris, whose eyes were completely misted over, pointed vaguely in Carmine’s direction to bring in the fanfare of trumpets sounding for Rachel on the other side, before the final majestic tutti.

The instant the red light went out, everyone burst out cheering. Boris had pinched Bill’s red-spotted handkerchief to wipe his eyes and was just about to congratulate Viking when the telephone rang. Snatching it up, Boris listened for a second.

‘You tell him. Vy do I always do your dirty vurk?’ he slammed down the receiver and took a deep breath.

‘Viking, that was fantastic, absolutely vonderful, perfect, out of these vorld, but we have technical fault. Could you possibly do exactly the same thing again?’

The orchestra winced collectively, waiting for the explosion.

‘I know women just like that,’ drawled Viking.

Everyone in the studio and the control-room collapsed in relieved and helpless laughter. And Viking did it again — even better.

The next moment he and Boris were hugging each other.

‘Let’s go and get vasted.’

FORTY-ONE

After getting plastered with Boris, Viking was woken at noon by his cleaner, Mrs Diggory, banging noisily against the skirting-boards as she hoovered outside his room. She was due to leave at one o’clock. She hadn’t been paid for three weeks, and was more hopeful of a Christmas bonus if she woke up Viking, who, when he was in funds, was the most generous of the Celtic Mafia. Picking his way through piles of dropped clothes, dog bowls and curry trays, carrying his head gingerly downstairs as if he were trying not to spill it, Viking begged Mrs Diggory to make him a cup of coffee.

‘I can’t do the bedrooms, they’re all occupied,’ she sniffed.

‘You can do mine,’ said Viking, ‘and change the sheets, please.’

‘Expecting company?’ Mrs Diggory had to slant the kettle to fill it above the mountain of soaking plates and mugs.

‘Probably,’ Viking peered gloomily at his reflection in the dingy hall mirror. His hair was so long on top, he’d soon have a middle parting like Nugent.

As he let Nugent out to see off any lurking duck, he noticed the shadow of Woodbine Cottage, across the lake through the bare trees above a fading red carpet of beech leaves.

Picking up the telephone, he called Giuseppe, Parker and Parker’s most sought-after hairdresser.

‘Of course, I’ll fit you in, Viking love, but why must you always call at the last minute?’

‘Going to get your hair done?’ said Mrs Diggory cosily, as she put three spoonfuls of sugar into night-black coffee.

‘I don’t have my hair done, I have it cot,’ said Viking haughtily, then, picking up Mrs Diggory’s copy of the Sun, and turning to the back page, exclaimed, ‘Glory Hallelujah!’

Seizing Mrs Diggory, he waltzed her round the kitchen.

‘Flora’s Pride won by three lengths at 40-1, I’ve just won two hundred quid.’

‘Most of that owed to me.’

‘Indeed it is.’ Viking retrieved a betting-slip before chucking his jeans into the washing-machine, and gave it to Mrs Diggory.

‘Hand it in to Ladbrokes in the High Street and keep the change for a Christmas bonus.’

‘You sure?’ squawked Mrs Diggory in delight.

‘Otterly.’

‘You won’t recognize your room when you get back.’

‘Leave the heating on, lock it, and leave the key in there — ’ Viking tapped the willow-pattern teapot on the dresser — ‘to stop the other basstards using it.’

‘Don’t get too whistled, and forget where I’ve left it.’

Viking glanced at his watch, and reached for the last wine bottle in the rack.

‘We’ve got time for a quick glass, then I mosst dash.’

‘You better wrap up warm, snow’s forecast.’

Searching for her cheque book in the chaos of the drawing-room, Flora discovered an Advent calendar Cherub had given Abby for Christmas, and in an orgy of misery wolfed all the chocolates behind the doors.

Still feeling sick, she wandered listlessly through Parker’s, mostly because it was the only warm place in the High Street. In the record department, she noticed how little music had been written for the viola. She must start singing again. What the hell could she buy her parents? A pair of boxing gloves? On her salary she could hardly afford the wrapping paper.

‘In the Bleak Midwinter,’ sang Hermione over the loudspeaker.

Flora had no difficulty recognizing the orchestra; she’d know that razor-sharp precision anywhere. Looking up, she saw a Rannaldini poster glaring down at her, an inch of white cuff showing off the only hands that had ever really given her pleasure, she had been cold, ever since his arms had left her.

Oh bloody hell, thought Flora, I’m not putting up with any more frozen nights at Woodbine Cottage.

Running downstairs to the Household Emporium, she was just paying for a very expensive electric blanket, when the cheque was removed from her hands and torn into tiny pieces.

Whipping round, Flora found herself looking at dark gold stubble, surrounding the widest, wickedest smile.

‘You’re not going to need that tonight, darling.’

‘I’ve just made out the bill,’ squawked the shop assistant, furious to be robbed of the tiny commission, ‘and dogs are not allowed in here.’

But Flora was gazing up into Viking’s face, the colour staining her pale cheeks. Suddenly they were interrupted by an old lady tapping on Viking’s shoulders.

‘That was a lovely concert, Victor, we enjoyed it so much.’

‘Thanks, darling,’ Viking had to bend right down to kiss her wrinkled cheek. ‘Happy Christmas, see you in the spring. And I’ll see you later,’ he added to Flora, then he and Nugent were gone, haring off to catch the lift for Giuseppe and the hairdressing salon.

‘Such a nice young man,’ quavered the old lady to Flora and the assistant, who clearly didn’t think so at all.

‘He played at the centre yesterday: Scott Joplin, “Bye, Bye Blackbird”, “We’ll Meet Again” — got us all on our feet dancing, even Mrs Bilson and she’s over ninety, and he bought a big box of chocolates and everyone a little bunch of flowers.’

‘Viking played to you at lunch-time yesterday?’ squeaked Flora.

The old lady nodded. ‘He often plays to us, and at the hospital. Other people come from the orchestra, but Victor’s our pin-up. I love his cheeky grin.’

‘Oh, so do I,’ said Flora. ‘Thank you for telling me, and Happy Christmas. I’m really sorry,’ she added to the assistant, ‘but I’ll spend the money somewhere else in the store. Can you possibly direct me to party dresses?’

Back at Woodbine Cottage, Marcus had finally got rid of his last pupil of the day.

Smothered in Opium, wearing the tightest bottle-green cashmere jersey, she had edged her stool up the keyboard, until Marcus was sitting on the window-sill.

Then, when he had showed her some fingering, she had put her other hand over his, imprisoning it and murmuring: ‘My mother used to know your father. She said he was seriously wicked.’

‘I’m just seriously boring,’ said Marcus apologetically, turning his head so her kiss fell on his jawbone.

As she was leaving, she gave him a biography of Rachmaninov and a bottle of Moët.

‘See you next term. I’m going to get a terrific suntan skiing.’

He hadn’t the heart to tell her that her scent gave him asthma. Why hadn’t he kissed her back? She’d been so pretty. What would it have mattered?

Yesterday he had given a Chopin and Liszt recital at an up-market girls’ day-school, and afterwards signed two hundred autographs.

‘You wouldn’t like a job teaching music, Mr Black?’ the headmistress had asked skittishly. ‘I’m sure you’d cure our truancy problem overnight.’

Then she had given him a fee of seventy-five pounds.

There was no way he could pay the rent or for the Stein way, and buy presents for Abby and Flora. The cottage bills were horrific; Flora left lights and fires on all the time, and neither she nor Abby thought anything of ringing long distance for hours.

Marcus’s studio was freezing, but except when he had pupils, he tried to put on four jerseys instead of the heating. As if to save him electricity, the falling snow was lighting the room, thickening branch and twig, filling up the winter jasmine curling inside the lank skeins of traveller’s joy. He put the biography of Rachmaninov in the bookshelf, above the rows of CDs, tapes and scores.

The most charitable way you could describe the studio inside was minimalist: as little clutter as possible to attract the dust mites that caused his asthma. There were no carpets on the bare boards. The only furniture was the Steinway, two piano-stools and the bed. On the walls, apart from the bookshelf, hung only the Munnings of Pylon Peggoty, his grandfather’s grey, given to him by Rupert.

His asthma had been particularly bad since The Messiah. After spending the night with Monica and Edith, his homesickness had been so great that he had driven out to Penscombe, and from the top road had watched Rupert, who used to bobsleigh, hurtling down the fields on a toboggan. In front of him sat Xavier, squealing with joy. A pack of excited dogs followed them, the yelling and barking echoing round the white valley as everything sparkled in the sunshine beneath a delphinium-blue sky.

Then Rupert had taken Xav’s hand, and led him and the toboggan back up the hill to help Taggie and Bianca, a dash of colour in a scarlet skiing suit, make a snowman on the lawn in front of the house. Marcus had slumped against the steering-wheel — ‘I’ve failed him, I’ve failed him,’ — and, in utter despair, had driven home.

Now he was going to fail Rupert again by selling the Munnings. He could imagine the letter arriving from Sotheby’s. ‘We’ve just got in a painting that might interest you,’ and his father’s lip curling when he saw the polaroid.

But the only thing in the pipeline was a concert at Ilkley which would cost him as much in petrol as the fee. Oh God, when would he get a break? He was trying to learn one of Liszt’s Mephisto Waltzes, but as he sat down at the piano, his fingers were too stiff and frozen to master the diabolical twists and turns, which reminded him of Rannaldini. Helen was pressuring him to join them both for Christmas. Marcus would rather stay in bed without food or heating.

It was half a minute before he realized the telephone was ringing; he only just got there.

‘This is Miles Brian-Knowles,’ said a prim, fastidious voice.

‘Sorry, I was miles away,’ stammered Marcus, which wasn’t a good start. Miles probably needed a babysitter.

Instead he said the RSO had been badly let down by Benny Basanovich.

‘Says he’s got flu, diplomatic, I imagine. It’s a short piece, only six minutes and quite honestly there’s so much din going on, the odd wrong note won’t matter. It’s Sonny Parker’s Interruption Suite. We’re recording it live. I wondered if you’d be interested?’

‘I’ll do it,’ Marcus was desperate to accept before Miles changed his mind, or remembered Marcus had once been so rude to Peggy Parker.

‘Is a thousand pounds enough?’

‘More than.’ In passionate relief, Marcus’s head dropped onto the top of the piano. ‘You’ve saved my life.’

‘I’m afraid there’s no time for an orchestral rehearsal, but if you make your way over to the hall, I can give you the score and a practice room.’

‘Oh thank you, thank you, Father Christmas has arrived a week early.’

Miles was touched.

‘It’s a pleasure. I wish all transactions were as easy.’

In her pigeon hole that evening, Flora found a bunch of white roses.

Darling Flora, said the accompanying note. Just apologizing in advance for my appalling behaviour later on this evening, Love Viking.

Flora gave a whoop of ecstasy. Dancing down the passage singing Boléro, she went slap into George Hungerford.

‘Why the bloody hell don’t you look where you’re going?’

‘Dum de-de-de. De-de, de-de, de-de dum, de-de-de,’ sang Flora, weaving round him into the women’s changing-room, where, to Clare, Candy, Nellie, Mary, Hilary and Juno’s irritation, she fought for once just as fiercely, as they did, for a space in front of the communal mirror.

‘You don’t normally wear make-up,’ said Juno accusingly.

‘You look really, really pretty,’ said Clare in amazement.

Flora broke open the cellophane with her teeth and handed her new eye-liner to Nellie.

‘Can you paint it on — my hands are shaking too much.’

‘Why are you suddenly so nervous?’ demanded Hilary.

‘Because my mate, Marcus, is making his début.’

‘That is one hell of a sassy dress,’ said Candy in wonder, as Flora slithered into a knee-length satin shift, only held up by two ribbon straps.

‘You can’t wear that, or those,’ spluttered Hilary, as Flora tucked her hair into a black velvet toggle and slotted in two of Viking’s white roses.

‘Mais, bien sûr,’ Flora wrapped a black silky mantilla round her shoulders, ‘particularly as we’re playing Boléro.’ And clacking her fingers like castanets, she danced out into the passage.

‘What has got into her?’ asked a shocked Juno.

Sonny’s Interruption, a grisly one-note job for orchestra, piano, burglar-alarm, fax, telephone bleeper, railway train, back-firing car, pneumatic drill, coughing, snoring, rustling and lavatory chain, was to be recorded after the interval and before Boléro and the singing of carols. Sonny had diverted most of the brass section to the Ladies’ lavatory to provide a flushing chorus. Cherub and the percussion section had gone beserk in rehearsal, imitating the various sounds.

Having plink-plonked his way through the piano part several times in his dressing-room, Marcus decided he couldn’t be nervous about something quite so silly — particularly when Sonny strutted in to give last-minute advice, wearing a collarless scarlet tunic, white silk trousers, red satin slippers and a white-and-red scarf round his ponytail.

‘Hallo, Marcus Black,’ he said in his reedy voice. ‘You must not be daunted by the complexities. Mozart appeared complex, too. Like my work, the beauty, richness and depth bewildered his first listeners.’

He then suggested Marcus ran through the solo, paddling away with suggested fingering, and shoving his bony pelvis so hard into Marcus’s back, Marcus nearly elbowed him in the groin.

Fortunately Flora barged in to wish Marcus luck.

Sonny was livid.

‘I told Miles — no interruptions.’

‘But the work is all about interruptions. Shall I go out, and come in and interrupt again to get you both in the mood?’

Marcus laughed. Sonny flounced off.

‘No-one looks prettier in tails than you do,’ said Flora in delight.

‘Or in black than you.’

There was a sparkle in her eyes that Marcus hadn’t seen for years.

As he tugged the maidenhair fern from behind a white carnation, graciously presented to him by Peggy Parker, he added: ‘Someone will have to turn the pages for me.’

‘I shall be hidden among the violas, thank God, and if the audience pelts us with tomatoes I hope they put basil on them.’

As Sonny had written in no trombone parts, Dixie volunteered for the job as page-turner, but, having been boozing all day, he couldn’t take it seriously.

‘Exciting having off-stage cow-bells,’ murmured Marcus, as they hovered in the wings.

‘Particularly when it’s conducted by an on-stage cow,’ said Dixie, as Sonny minced out of the conductor’s room and swept him and Marcus onto an exceedingly crowded platform.

There were overhead mikes for Marcus and each section, and bigger mikes dotted around the auditorium for general ambience. Sonny gave a little fluting speech, reminding the audience they were taking part in an experience as creatively significant as the first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder.

‘Remember your clap or cough will be recorded for posterity, so make it loud, and wait for the red light.’

Dixie proceeded to belch loudly into Marcus’s microphone.

‘That’s the spirit,’ cried Sonny, who loved big butch Glaswegians, ‘but save it for the red light.’

The audience looked frightfully excited, delighted to have something as beautiful as Marcus to gaze at if the music became too demanding.

On came the red light, up started the atrocious din. Dixie couldn’t stop laughing particularly when the lavatory chains wouldn’t pull in time, and the audience, having been exhorted by Sonny to cough as much as possible, found they couldn’t stop. Viking and Barry the Bass rang each other up on their mobiles and chatted throughout.

Marcus was thumping away, trying to be heard over the uproar, when Little Cherub, racing back from xylophone to cow-bells, took a flying leap and fell flat on his face. Dixie was in such hysterics, he knocked Marcus’s score onto the floor, and picking it up, shoved it back upside-down by mistake.

Flora had also chosen that moment to wriggle out of her black mantilla. Viking was not the only musician to be distracted by the beauty of her shoulders. Dixie was so mesmerized, there was no way Marcus could attract his attention to put his music the right way up. The only answer was to ad lib, plink-plonking away to the end. Immediately the audience leapt to their feet applauding wildly so that their clap could be recorded for posterity.

‘Only getting up to relieve their piles,’ said Dixie scornfully.

But Marcus had slunk off the stage, petrified the wrath of Parker was going to descend on him for playing the wrong ending. Instead, after taking three bows, an ecstatic Sonny rushed into Marcus’s dressing-room, saying his work had never been so movingly interpreted.

‘I wept. I could not understand how I could write such beautiful music. Mumsy, Mumsy,’ cried Sonny, as Peggy swept in in a mauve satin marquee, ‘I am going to write a concerto for Marcus Black.’

Marcus cringed behind the upright piano.

But Peggy was prepared to let bygones be byge-owns, and presented Marcus with a large Christmas hamper.

‘You’ve done my Sonny proud, we look forward to receiving you at Rutminster Towers.’

Cherub also received a smaller hamper for being wounded in action, and the brass section were each given a bottle of champagne for pulling the chain so meaningfully.

Gilbert and Gwynneth were also in raptures. They had never seen a Rutminster audience enjoy themselves so much. At last music was being brought to the people. They made a point of seeking Marcus out and commending his sensitive playing.

‘We’re staying in the Close with Canon Airlie,’ whispered Gwynneth, ‘please drop in for carols and wassail later.’

‘You’re terribly kind,’ Marcus ducked to avoid a flying earring.

‘We’re going to hear a good deal more of Black,’ said Gilbert as he drifted out.

That boy’s done well, thought George, he made a diabolical piece of music sound almost good.

‘Could I have a word?’ he asked Marcus.

Ravel had once confessed sadly that Boléro was his only masterpiece and it contained no music. But after Sonny’s self-indulgent, mindless, ear-murdering junk, Boléro sounded glorious. Tommy Stainforth, Principal Percussion, joined later by Cherub, his nose bleed staining his white shirt like a boy soldier in battle, kept up the relentless hypnotic beat on their silver snare-drums, while sections and soloists took it in turns to snake languorously in and out of the one disturbingly beautiful tune.

‘The viola player’s problem in Boléro is keeping awake,’ Candy had warned Flora.

But instead, as the entire string section put down their bows and plucked their instruments like flamenco guitars, the sound made Flora burst with pride. She suddenly felt part of the great heartbeat of the orchestra as the music slowly swelled to a stupendous climax with the last clashing discord from the brass.

‘That’s definitely coitus non-interruptus,’ shouted Clare over the delirious torrent of applause. ‘I wish sex was as good as that.’

It will be with Viking, thought Flora, but when she glanced round, the First Horn’s chair was empty.

Faint with disappointment, suddenly exhausted, Flora could hardly lift her bow during the carols; and, as the last notes of ‘Adeste Fideles’ died away and the audience, now in party mood, called for encore, Viking was still missing.

‘Buggered off on some date,’ sighed Candy.

Meanwhile, outside the conductor’s room, Miles was having a row with Abby, Julian and a large black-and-white pantomime cow.

‘We rehearsed “The Shepherd’s Farewell” as an encore,’ Miles was saying angrily.

‘The audience expect Rodney’s cow,’ said Abby firmly. ‘She’s a Christmas fixture.’

The cow nodded in agreement and rubbed its furry head against Abby’s arm.

‘You can’t lower the tone,’ ordered Miles, ‘not with the Arts Council present.’

‘Bugger the Arts Council,’ said the back of the cow, doing a high kick. The front of the cow let out a high-pitched giggle, leaving no doubt as to its identity.

‘Shut up,’ hissed Miles glancing round in terror. ‘Gilbert and Gwynneth were backstage earlier. If you don’t play “The Shepherd’s Farewell”, Abby, heads will roll.’

The shouts of encore and the stamp of feet were growing in volume.

‘Come on, you guys,’ said Abby defiantly, waltzing off towards the stage.

‘Miserable old bugger,’ said the back legs, as the cow lumbered after her.

‘I’ll have you know, I’m still here,’ said Miles furiously.

Such screams of joy greeted the arrival of the cow on stage, that it was a few minutes before Abby could make herself heard.

‘Sir Rodney is really disappointed not to be here to wish you all a merry Christmas — ’ the audience gave a great cheer — ‘but he’s a lot better, right? And he hopes to be back on the rostrum some time next year.’

‘Bravo,’ shouted everyone.

‘Meanwhile, he’s sent you a very special soloist.’

The cow did a soft-shoe shuffle to more deafening cheers.

‘Good evening, Mrs Cow,’ continued Abby, ‘are you going to play us a tune?’

Slowly the cow nodded, batting her long black eyelashes.

‘What about some Mozart or perhaps some Beethoven?’

The cow shook her head.

‘Or some Schoenberg.’

For a second the front of the cow deliberated, wondering whether to drop the back legs in it, then slowly she shook her head again.

‘I know,’ said Abby over the howls of laughter, ‘can you play us some Tchaikovsky?’

The cow nodded frantically, and next moment the back half launched into the beautiful French horn solo from the second movement of the Fifth Symphony leaving absolutely no doubt as to his identity either, and the audience went beserk.

But when Flora finally escaped from the platform, she couldn’t find Viking anywhere. Aching all over but most of all in her heart, she trailed off to congratulate Marcus.

She found him in a daze; the last well-wisher had only just left.

‘The good news is,’ he told her, ‘that George Hungerford has decided to junk Benny and book me for Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto at the end of February.’

As Flora whooped and hugged him, an inner voice chided her that both Abby and Marcus were getting on with their careers and she was getting nowhere, not even to first base with Viking. Bitterly ashamed of being mean spirited, she was doing a war dance round Marcus, when he continued: ‘And the bad news is that Sonny is a serious bum-bandit and wants me to have dinner with him.’

‘Omigod, you’ll never cope with Peggy as a mother-in-law. Let’s rush off and have an Indian,’ said Flora.

Viking had obviously been playing games, she thought despairingly.

FORTY-TWO

Flora’s fears were confirmed as she and Marcus ran towards the car-park, and rounding a corner, stumbled on Viking and Serena Westwood in a huddle.

Seeing Flora, Mr Nugent bounded forward joyfully. Viking had his back to her, but, catching sight of her red hair reflected in the window, he reached behind him and grabbed her hand.

‘Serena, you haven’t met Flora, she’s a dote.’

‘A dote?’ Serena looked puzzled and not very pleased.

Sliding his arm round Flora’s shoulders, Viking drew her against his long hard body. His hair was still wet from the shower — he had shaved off this morning’s stubble.

‘A little dote,’ he added caressingly. ‘Dotey’s the adjective, it’s an Irish word,’ he curled a warm palm round Flora’s neck, ‘means that everyone dotes on her.’

‘How nice for Flora,’ said Serena crisply. She’d heard differently from others. ‘Hallo, Marcus,’ she added with considerably more warmth. ‘You played beautifully.’

‘And Hatchet Hungerford’s just booked him to do Rach Three in Feb,’ beamed Flora. It was incredible that Viking’s hand on her neck could cure all her aches and tiredness in a second. ‘So we must celebrate.’

‘We certainly mosst, that’s tremendous,’ Viking clapped Marcus on the shoulder. Then, turning to Serena, added, ‘Have a good Christmas, darling, let me know what you decide.’

As he led Flora and Marcus towards the car-park, he explained.

‘The playback of the Requiem was so dire, Serena and George have decided to reschedule it with L’Appassionata conducting.’

‘Abby’ll be knocked out,’ said Marcus in delight.

‘And with Julian back as leader so he can play the big violin solo.’

‘Bill Thackery will shoot himself,’ said Flora.

‘Save everyone else doing the job.’

Outside, six inches of snow had blanketed everything: cars, houses, railings, lamp-posts, each blade of grass. To this, a heavy hoar frost had added a diamanté sparkle, so the great horse-chestnuts in the park seemed like glittering white clouds beneath a clear starry sky. Cyril’s bird-table had become a wedding-cake awaiting decoration and across the town, the cathedral gleamed like a vast lurking iceberg.

Nugent went beserk, tunnelling his snapping snout through the snow, leaping in ecstasy, emerging with a white-powdered wig on his furry black head. Having sent him hurtling across the park after a snowball, Viking scooped up more snow, hardened it into another ball and closed Flora’s hands round it.

‘Josst feel it melting like my heart,’ he whispered, then turning to Marcus, said, ‘Sorry, mate, I can’t control myself any longer.’

Looking up, Flora was amazed to see the amused tenderness softening his thin face and narrowed eyes. His hair gleamed as gold as Mars in the moonlight. As he took her hot flushed face in his long Jack Frost fingers, she could smell the faint apple blossom of Giuseppe’s shampoo, taste toothpaste and feel the snowball clutched in her hands melting like her entrails.

Then he kissed her, first very slowly, his tongue flickering over hers, then harder and harder, a mixture of deliberation and such passion that Flora, arching against him, felt like a bonfire bursting into sudden spontaneous flame in the middle of the Antarctic.

Not having the superior breath control of a brass player, she had to pull away first but kept her eyes shut.

‘Is it really you?’

‘Really.’

‘Oh Viking.’

‘I am otterly, otterly hooked,’ he murmured into her hair.

Flora jumped as, like a rug suddenly laid over her knees, she felt Nugent leaning against her, gazing up with shining eyes, his tail sweeping out a black fan on the white path.

‘I’m enjoying watching Gone with the Wind,’ called out Marcus through blue lips, ‘but I’m about to freeze to death.’

‘Oh Jesus, I’m sorry,’ said Viking.

As his BMW slid round the Close, icicles were glittering from the red roofs of the Queen Anne houses, magnolias and ceanothus in the front gardens buckled under their burdens of snow.

‘God knows how they got a licence for this place,’ said Viking, as he pulled up beside a club called Close Encounters which was pounding out reggae music. ‘Someone must have greased Planning Officer Cardew’s palm again.’

Inside, through the gloom, the Celtic Mafia, Cherub, Noriko, Clare, Candy and Nellie could be seen getting plastered, drinking half-pints of wine out of little jugs, coughing in unison and collapsing in laughter at their own jokes.

Once Viking and Marcus had sat down beside them, Dixie started acting up; he had taken a great shine to Marcus, and had them all in stitches offering to turn the pages of his menu for him, then handing it to him upside-down.

‘He’s Sonny’s Valentine, sweet Sonny’s Valentine,’ sang Randy.

Everyone howled again.

‘We have got some catching up to do,’ sighed Viking, looking sympathetically at Marcus.

Returning from the Ladies, Flora took a slug of wine and nearly spat it out.

‘Ugh, it’s corked.’

‘That’s because you’ve just cleaned your te-heeth,’ said Clare slyly. ‘Even Krug tastes vile after Colgate.’

‘We ought to invent a drink mixing them,’ said Marcus, ‘and call it Buck Teeth.’

‘And Gwynneth could do the ads,’ said Flora.

So everyone stuck out their teeth like Gwynneth and giggled hysterically.

‘To stop arguments, I’ve ordered lasagne for everyone,’ said Blue.

When the band took a break, the RSO, to the other diners’ amazement, took over. Randy seized a trumpet, Nellie and Noriko picked up guitars, Cherub sat down at the drums, Marcus was persuaded to play the piano, as they swung into Boléro.

Blue didn’t want to dance, so Dixie got up with Candy and Clare, Viking and Flora followed them.

Viking was a wonderful dancer, he had the endless legs, and narrow rubber hips that slide into any rhythm.

‘Dum, de-de, dum, de-de, de-de, de-de, dum de-de-dum,’ sang Flora, writhing like a charmed snake in front of him, her hips occasionally grazing his body, her black skirt and red hair flying.

‘Marvellous beat to fock to,’ Viking drew her against him, rotating his pelvis against hers.

‘OK, Marcus?’ gasped Flora as she emerged from his embrace two minutes later with buckling knees.

What would she have done if I’d said I wasn’t, wondered Marcus, as he idly picked out the first subject of Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto — moody, mysterious, impossibly difficult music. He wished he could go home and look at the score, which he had only two months to learn. It would be like taming a dragon.

He’d prayed for a break like this for so long, but looking across at Viking and Flora, he felt hollow with loneliness and would have given every note of the concerto to be able to wipe Abby out with the same white-hot passion. Marcus sighed. Viking had a terrible reputation. He did hope Flora wouldn’t be hurt again, and Abby was going to be insane with jealousy when she found out. What an awful lot of pieces to pick up.

The band and the lasagne arrived at the same time. Neither Viking nor Flora wanted theirs, so Nugent ate both.

‘It’s such years since anyone put me off my food,’ said Flora happily.

Turning towards her on the bench-seat, blocking out the others’ view with his broad back, Viking removed her mantilla from her left shoulder, examining a row of long scratches.

‘Jack Rodway do that?’

‘No Scriabin — he thinks he’s a witch’s cat, and takes flying leaps onto my bare shoulders.’

‘Locky Scriabin,’ Viking kissed the longest scratch. ‘Why’d d’you go to bed with Jack?’

‘I needed a practice fence.’

‘I was so opset.’

‘You’re so glamorous,’ Flora ran a finger along his jutting lower lip. ‘One can’t imagine you upset about anything except playing badly or not uniting Ireland.’

‘I’ve dreamt for a long time of being united with Flora.’ As insistent as the Boléro beat, his hand was stroking the inside of her arm, her jawline, her earlobes.

Then she told him about Carmine trying to rape her.

‘Jack was the escape route, he had a green Exit sign on his forehead, and a push bar at his waist.’

Viking laughed. Only by his hand tightening on her shoulder did he show his fury.

‘The basstard,’ he said slowly, ‘and he keeps his wife in a veal crate. Cathie didn’t have flu, he broke her jaw.’

‘Omigod, is that why Blue’s so down? They ought to elope, she’s so good, she could easily support herself.’

‘Carmine’s ripped away every thread of her self-esteem.’

The waiters were back with menus offering puddings.

Viking shook his head. ‘I’m having a pause.’

‘You’re going through the male menu-pause,’ said Flora, falling about at her own joke.

‘I’m sorry,’ Viking pulled her to her feet, ‘I have to fock you.’

Outside it had snowed and frozen again.

‘D’you think I’m too dronk to drive?’

‘Frankly yes,’ said Flora swinging round a lamp-post. ‘If you even looked at a Breathalyser it would play “The Drinking Song.”’

‘Why don’t we try one of these bikes?’

Hearing a loud bang outside, the others, who’d started trashing the place, rushed out swinging lavatory chains, to find Nugent barking, Flora giggling in the snow, Viking sitting beside her rubbing her laddered knees and an ancient blue bike on its side with its wheels going round and round.

After that everyone had a go on it, drink insulating them against the cold, their shouts of laughter sending windows shooting up all round the Close. Any grizzled head foolish enough to emerge was pelted with snowballs. Cherub was so drunk he kept climbing into the engine of Dixie’s car. Clare kept patting a black litter-bin, mistaking it for Mr Nugent. As Flora had another go, the seat shot upwards, nearly depositing her on the ground.

‘It’s a Fanny cycle,’ she shrieked, narrowly avoiding a pillar-box. ‘Oh Gilbert, Gilbert, oh fa la, la, la.’

‘Stop that noise,’ said a ringing voice from above.

‘Oh fuck off,’ said Randy. ‘It’s my turn now, Flora.’

Vaguely Marcus remembered he had been invited to a wassail party in the Close.

Clambering on board, Randy set off guiding the bike with one hand, swinging a Close Encounter lavatory chain with the other. Shooting across the grass in the centre of the square, straight through a bed of sleeping wallflowers, he hit the fountain where Charles I had refreshed himself during the Civil War with an almighty bang.

The bicycle was a crumpled heap, the fountain in intensive care, the imprint of Randy’s huge body lay etched in the snow, but remounting, the intrepid trumpeter shot off down the path, falling off again, so the bike carried on up a ramp, and disappeared through the door of some ecclesiastical building. This was followed by another loud bang to the accompaniment of police sirens.

‘Quick,’ Viking seized Flora’s hand. ‘They segregate the sexes in police cells.’

Very slowly Viking drove back down the middle of the road. Snow on top of hoar frost had fluffed up the trees on either side like cherry orchards in bloom. Huge flakes drifted down soft as butterflies.

‘Your place or mine?’ asked Viking.

‘Oh yours,’ said Flora, remembering the compost heap of her bedroom and that Abby would be home.

Viking kissed one of her hands.

‘So young and soft,’ he said mockingly.

‘Hands that don’t do dishes, I’m afraid. I’m an awful slut.’

‘But the nails are bitten — I noticed that at your audition. You smiled, pretty as a daffodil. You played In the South to tear the heartstrings. But I knew you were sad.’

‘I’m OK,’ squeaked Flora, jumping as the top of the car scraped against some bowed-down branches.

‘Who hurt you?’

‘Oh Christ, a guy called Rannaldini. I was terribly young — I can’t talk about it.’

‘I’ll kill anyone who hurts you.’ Somehow Viking manoeuvred the car into the lane down to the lake, skidding most of the way.

‘I’ll exorcize Carmine, I’ll exorcize Rannaldini,’ he added dismissively.

‘Better buy me an exorcize bicycle,’ said Flora.

Between towering beeches, like ice cliffs, the lake glittered in the moonlight, arctic white along the frozen edges, but with a dark badger stripe of flowing water down the centre.

‘I’ve always wondered what this house looks like inside,’ said Flora, getting out of the car.

The ground floor of The Bordello trebled up as a kitchen, dining-room and drawing-room. Shabby, different coloured armchairs and a dark blue sofa were grouped around an open fireplace with a huge television set on the right. Chucked into a corner were golf clubs, tennis rackets, cricket bats, an old saddle, football and cricket boots. A not-often-scrubbed table by the oven was weighed down with old newspapers, Racing Posts, Sporting Lifes, Clare’s Tatlers, scores, books, shoulder pads, unopened bills.

Flora’s eyes, however, were drawn up to an old-fashioned clothes-horse, from which hung white evening shirts and a rainbow riot of clothes, no doubt belonging to the women in Viking’s life.

‘Why are you so bloody promiscuous?’ She was appalled to hear the petulance in her voice.

Viking, who was getting a key out of a blue teapot, smiled sweetly.

‘Like Marlon Brando, I have to have at least three women a day to prove I’m not gay. I’ve only had two this evening, come here.’

But, overwhelmed with shyness and longing, Flora had fled upstairs to the bathroom to find more dripping tights and exotic underwear. She had seen those French knickers on Candy, and the camisole top trimmed with blue ribbon on Clare, but whose was the black lacey 34D cup bra and the black suspender belt and the fishnet stockings.

Oh hell, hell, hell.

Furiously she cleaned her teeth again, then ripped off her laddered tights and knickers, washing between her legs, then splashing herself over and over again with cold water, in case, as Rannaldini had once grumbled, she tasted of soap. She was just nicking Clare’s body lotion when Nugent barged in, rounded her up and led her back to Viking’s bedroom, curling up on his bean bag with a long sigh.

Flora looked at the huge brass four-poster hiding in its dark red rose-patterned curtains and shivered. The curtains on either side of the window overlooking the lake were drawn, but Viking had opened the ones overlooking the white wilderness of garden so the moonlight flooded the room.

‘Oh please, Nugent,’ begged Flora, ‘give me a few tips, so I can be more exciting than the others.’

Whipping off her dress, she was about to dive under the dark green duvet, when she was distracted by the squares of moonlight on the bare floorboards.

Unzipping his jeans, as he came through the door, Viking found Flora, silver-white as a unicorn, hair and small breasts flying, as she hopscotched back and forth on the moonlit squares.

Her skin was as cool and satiny as new beech leaves, she tasted so sweet and fresh as he kissed her before gathering her up and laying her out on the clean white sheets. Without any hurry, he began to stroke her. Flora tried to be cool as the leisurely caresses crept down her increasingly excited body, but couldn’t help gasping with pleasure as his fingers slid inside her. Viking gasped too.

‘Jesus, sweetheart, you really want me.’

He was still wearing boxer shorts covered in Golden Retrievers carrying the Irish Times.

As he peeled them off, his cock shot upwards.

‘Oh wow cubed,’ Flora stretched out a hand, ‘and you truly want me. Now I know why Yeats kept banging on about Irish towers.’

‘Shot op,’ Viking’s big grinning mouth stopped hers, and his infinitely delicate caresses continued until Flora was squirming with ecstasy. She was dying to come, yet some tension, some passionate desire not to bore him, prevented her, so she wriggled out of his grasp, down the bed to go down on him.

Instantly he pulled her back, burying his head between her legs, a blond haystack at the end of her white sweep of belly, his fingers stroking her nipples.

‘Go on, angel,’ he mumbled, ‘go for it — we’ve got for ever. I’ve never tasted anything so delicious.’ His tongue rotated languorously.

Flora took several quick breaths and came.

‘God, you sweet little girl,’ Viking bounded up the bed, pressing his mouth on hers.

‘That was bliss,’ sighed Flora. ‘Let me give you pleasure, please.’

‘You are,’ Viking slid his cock inside her and began to move.

‘Aaaaaah,’ moaned Flora, ‘God, that’s wonderful. Clare was quite wrong about Boléro being better than the real thing.’

They made love all night, wallowing in pleasure, constantly changing position. Around quarter to five, Flora discovered why Viking had been nervous of her going down on him. As she parted his legs, and bent her head to kiss her way up the inside of one of his wonderfully hard muscular thighs, she discovered in the moonlight a tattoo saying, ‘I love Juno’, and burst out laughing.

‘That’s a bit arbitrary.’

‘I was pissed,’ said Viking sheepishly.

‘What on earth did Juno think?’

‘She was terrified I’d start flashing it around like an engagement ring.’

‘She’s amazingly pretty, but what made you fall in love with her?’

Viking shrugged.

‘She’s small minded, suburban and terribly cross, but when I held that tiny waist between my hands and watched her ride me, I guess a standing cock has no taste.’

‘Yours tastes lovely,’ Flora crouched over him, her tongue was snaking round the rim, searching out pleasure points, probing the top.

Groaning with pleasure, Viking let her continue until he was about to explode. Then he wriggled out from under her, pointing a long finger at the clock beside the bed, whose red numbers said it was five o’clock.

‘That was one of Rodney’s great sayings.’

‘What?’

‘No sea too rough, no muff too tough, we dive at five.’

She could feel his shoulders shaking with laughter.

‘Please come back and fuck me.’

Viking slid back inside her, gently stroking her face with the back of his fingers. ‘You are so lovely.’

‘And you,’ sighed Flora, ‘are a midwinter night’s dream come true.’

At eight, Flora staggered out of bed.

‘I ought to go home, I’ve got to change and have a bath.’

‘Have one here — I’m not letting you out of my sight.’

As she opened the curtains overlooking the lake, a faint band of orange lay along the horizon. Above, out of a pearly grey sky, shone Venus like a huge glittering snowflake.

‘Oh look, the planet of love is smiling at us. Oh Christ!’

At the crunch of passing car wheels, Flora shut the curtains with a snap. ‘It’s Abby, going to work. She’s not going to be very pleased with us.’

FORTY-THREE

Three hours later George barged into the middle of a rehearsal and bawled his musicians out for behaving like hooligans. His fury was fuelled by the sight of Flora, still in last night’s black dress, cowering behind Fat Isobel.

‘You’re a bluddy disgrace,’ he thundered. ‘And I want everyone who was in Close Encounters last night to write a personal letter of apology to Gilbert Greenford from the Arts Council whose push-bike you totalled last night. Gilbert has had that bike, Clara, since he was at university.’

‘Back in the fifteenth century,’ piped up Cherub.

‘Shut ooop,’ roared George, as various musicians started to laugh. Couldn’t the stupid fuckers realize the influence the Arts Council had on their future, and how near the edge they were?

‘The cost of a new bike and seven toilet chains will be docked off your salaries.’

‘Flora will have to consult her lawyer,’ shouted Randy. ‘Whoops, sorry,’ he added as he received a death-ray scowl from George.

Abby was also furious. Any delight that she’d been vindicated by the rescheduling of Rachel’s Requiem was wiped out by her misery and excruciating jealousy that Flora had finally got off with Viking.

Refusing to admit this publicly, she later worked off her rage bellyaching about the state of the cottage and Flora’s tip of a room in particular, until even Marcus told her to shut up.

‘Bloody judgemental home,’ grumbled Flora, and promptly moved in with Viking for the weekend, neither emerging from the bedroom except to let Nugent out.

Every time Abby drove into Rutminster she was sent flying by delivery vans from Oddbins, the Pizza House or the Star of India belting the other way.

George just managed to forgive the rest of the RSO in time for the staff Christmas party, which also ushered in Centenary Year.

Miss Priddock supervised the food including a chocolate birthday cake with a hundred candles. The brass players blew up the balloons. Hilary was furious because Randy had taken a photograph of her surreptitiously reading The Scorpion and pinned it on the notice-board — life had been very hard since Lionel left — but with a martyred air she joined forces with Juno in decorating the band room.

Romance watchers also were aware that every time Juno put up pale blue paper-chains, George Hungerford seemed to materialize from the fifth floor to hold the ladder and admire her delicate ankles.

Flora, nervous her job might be in jeopardy, as a peace offering bought George a pair of musical socks decorated with santas and reindeers which played Jingle Bells’ whenever you pulled them up. As George made no comment, he obviously thought Flora was sending him up.

Hilary tartly refused her offer of help with the decorations so Flora retreated to the park to make a snow-woman waving a stick with Cherub. She didn’t know why she was feeling depressed, tiredness and post-too-many-coituses probably. Underneath she was miserable about hurting Abby and persuaded Dixie to ask Abby to take part in the Christmas party cabaret.

Abby was touchingly grateful.

‘What would you like me to do?’

‘What you do best. Play your violin and get young Marcus to accompany you. We’ll put you on late in the evening, give him time to get a bit oiled.’

The cabaret kicked off with Randy in a dark curly wig, with two melons stuck into the front of Clare’s black dress, coming on as Dame Hermione and screeching: ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth.’

Francis the Good Loser, who didn’t have to dress up at all came on as the drunken tramp who tried to outsing her.

Both were caterwauling away and the audience were holding their sides, when in stumped Blue in one of Miss Priddock’s tweed suits, wearing thick tights, brogues, a monocle and a pork-pie hat as Dame Edith. Having driven the tramp off with a hunting-whip she started chatting up Hermione.

‘You’re a lovely little filly, what does your DBE stand for?’

‘Dame of the Bottom Enormous,’ simpered Hermione. ‘I know that my Redeemer-’

‘Oh, cut that crap,’ boomed Edith. ‘I hear the shit’s hit the Fanny Cycle over the RSO. They’ll never get their Arts Council grant now.’

‘I’d rather have Hugh Grant,’ sighed Hermione. ‘I know that my-’

‘Shut up,’ repeated Edith. ‘Goodo, here come Gilbert and Sillyone to give us the low-down.’

Bellows of laughter, screams of joy and even tighter lips from Miles and Hilary, who was taking a lot of photographs, greeted the entrance of Viking. He was wearing a mauve-and-orange caftan, a grey wig with a lopsided bun, an even more lopsided bosom, sticking-out teeth from the joke shop and earrings made from school band cymbals which he crashed whenever he was making a point. He also kept greedily taking bites out of an enormous Christmas pudding.

‘I must have desserts,’ he announced, exactly capturing Gwynneth’s refined North London whine. ‘A bombe surprise a day keeps Hungerford away.’

Viking was followed by Dixie, in an identical caftan as goaty Gilbert. He was carrying an urn with the words ‘Clara’ on the side and wiping his eyes with a long ginger beard.

‘Hallo Sillyone,’ demanded Edith. ‘What’s in that urn?’

‘Don’t upset Gilbert,’ whispered Gwynneth. ‘His cycle, Clara, passed away last Wednesday. We’re off to scatter her ashes on Vinifred Trapp’s grave.’

‘I know that my Redeemer-’ squawked Hermione.

‘Actually not quite all Clara’s ashes,’ confided Gwynneth, as Gilbert gave a great sob. ‘Gilbert has donated her handlebars to a co-operative for battered push-bikes, so she can be recycled as intristing earrings to enable me to black a few more people’s eyes.’ Viking put down his pudding, stuck out his teeth and gave his cymbal earrings a great crash. Peering from the wings Flora saw that George was crying with laughter.

‘He is human, after all,’ she hissed to Abby.

‘What happened to Clara?’ enquired Dame Edith.

‘Battered to death by the Celtic Mafia,’ sobbed Gilbert. ‘They must be punished.’

‘Surely the Celtic Mafia are an ethnic minority and therefore exonerated from all blame,’ asked Hermione.

‘Certainly not,’ Gwynneth crashed her cymbals. ‘They are white, male and heterosexual, so it doesn’t count.’

‘Gimme their address,’ squealed Hermione.

‘Ah, here comes our favourite patron of the arts, Piggy Porker. Good evening to you, Piggy.’

‘This has gone too far,’ hissed Miles, to a crescendo of cheering and hysterical laughter, as a heavily padded grotesquely over made-up Flora, teetered on in blue stilettos and a sick-green spangled dress, snorting loudly, and waving a Parker’s carrier bag.

‘I quite agree,’ George wiped his eyes, ‘but it is bluddy funny.’

Somehow Flora achieved a wobbly curtsy.

‘Good evening, your dameships,’ she snorted. ‘Ay would so laike to create new looks for you both. Any face is improved by subtle make-up.’ And, reaching into her Parker’s bag, she slammed custard pies in Edith’s and Hermione’s faces.

‘I know that my Redeemer-’ screeched Hermione, spitting out cream and pastry.

‘Have you got a mirror? I don’t carry one,’ said Dame Edith.

‘You both look much younger,’ went on Piggy Parker. ‘I’ve come to invite you all to a brown tre-ouser event at Parker’s next week. My Sonny is… oh, here’s Sonny to tell you himself.’

Despite the yells of approval and laughter, no-one at first recognized the concave fop who minced in in a red tunic and floppy white trousers, because the face was almost entirely concealed by curtains of straggly hair.

‘I am the RSO’s composer-in-undesirable residence,’ fluted Sonny, crashing Viking’s earrings, ‘but it’s getting me nowhere because I’ve fallen madly in love with Marcus Black and he won’t return my calls.’

Marcus gave a gasp of horror and delight.

‘Abby, you bitch,’ he said.

‘It’s Abby,’ screamed Nellie. ‘That’s brilliant.’

‘I want him to play on my portable organ,’ Abby tried to make herself heard over the whistling, stamping and yells of approval.

But George was on his feet, sprinting out through the exit, round onto the stage, stopping the performance before Jerry could video anything more or Hilary take any more photographs.

‘I’m sorry that’s enoof,’ he shouted from the rostrum to equal boos and cheers. ‘Mrs Parker, Sonny, Gilbert and Gwynneth all said they might look in later and I for one don’t want the RSO committing pooblic suicide joost yet. I joost wish all you boogers would put as much creative energy into your music-making. But I have to admit it was bluddy foony.’

Packing the cast off to seats in the auditorium, he then congratulated the orchestra on some good concerts, but said it was high time they stopped behaving like hooligans.

‘We moost capitalize on Centenary Year to put the RSO in the black again.’

As was customary he then asked them to drink to their musical director.

Abby had pulled off her wig and her beard and ruffled her dark curls. A week of sleepless nights over Viking and Flora made her look pale and vulnerable.

‘You are a great orchestra,’ she said in a choked voice when the drunken cheers had died down. ‘And we’ve always programmed great composers, so if we’ve managed to make great music, I have only been the catalyst. Thank you for putting up with me.’

‘God, I feel a cow,’ said Flora, as Viking slid an arm round her shoulders. ‘Abby’s so lovely.’

‘She may not be so lovely when we go back to the cottage together later,’ murmured Viking.

Randy’s wife and his mother-in-law had descended unexpectedly to Christmas shop and intended to spend the night in The Bordello. Great armfuls of female underwear had been hastily chucked in the cellar. Viking had agreed to vacate his bedroom for Randy’s mother-in-law and planned an away fixture. Flora was extremely twitchy about Abby.

On rolled Miss Priddock’s cake on its trolley. The hundred candles were lit which set off the smoke alarm so five butch firemen suddenly appeared. Everyone was convinced they were a stripagram so they stayed on for the party to Nellie’s delight.

Rodney had sent six crates of Moët over as a Christmas present so everyone had plenty to drink. Very generously under the circumstances, Peggy Parker had given each member of the orchestra a turkey. Blue didn’t get a chance to speak to Cathie because Carmine was watching her, but he did manage to slip a little sapphire ring into the pocket of her coat hanging up in the Ladies and prayed she’d find it.

By eleven o’clock Marcus, slightly drunk and happy because he’d felt he’d comforted Abby a little in the last week, had lost his nerves enough to play the piano.

Not realizing how many people had stopped to listen and started to dance, he meandered through Gershwin and Cole Porter, then launched into a Seventies hit called ‘Madly in Love’ with Abby accompanying him swooningly on the violin.

What he didn’t realize was that Abby had persuaded Charlton Handsome to slip a recording mike in front of him which also picked up the ecstatic cheering and shouts for more at the end.

‘That recording’ll be worth a fortune one day,’ murmured Julian.

‘Boy plays like an angel,’ George said proudly to Miles, ‘I’m right glad we booked him.’

Abby and Marcus left soon afterwards because she was flying back to Philadelphia first thing the following morning. As Flora and Viking tottered out arm in arm several hours later, they found Eldred on the H. P. Hall steps, weeping at the prospect of a wifeless Christmas.

‘I’m coming back to Woodbine Cottage on Boxing Day,’ Flora comforted him. ‘I’ll ring you, you must come and try our erratic cooking and Marcus, you and I can play chamber music. We could start off with the Mozart Trio.’

Flora only stopped crying over Eldred as Viking drove over Rutminster Bridge and pointed out a very drunk Davie Buckle hurling his turkey into the River Fleet, yelling: ‘Go on, you bastard, fly.’

Trying to creep in without turning on any lights, Flora and Viking knocked over an umbrella stand and fell over Abby’s cases already out on the landing. Abby pulled a pillow over her head in anguish. Would she ever sleep again?

It seemed only seconds later that she was woken up by horrifying screams. Wrapping her naked body in a towel, tiptoeing onto the landing, she could hear Viking saying, ‘It’s OK, sweetheart, I’m here, it’s OK.’

He sounded so tender and loving. Almost deranged with misery, Abby could hardly read her watch. Five-thirty. She had to leave for Heathrow in an hour, she might as well get up.

Tottering wearily downstairs, she found it was still dark. Rain was rattling against the windows, pounding away the last patches of snow on the lawn. As she filled up the kettle, she heard piteous mewing. Frightened away earlier by Nugent, but seeing a light on, Sibelius had jumped onto the ledge and was squashing his drenched fur against the window-pane.

‘Oh, poor baby.’ Abby opened the window and, whipping off her towel, began to dry him, crooning how much she was going to miss him, patting his piebald face, squeezing water out of his furry tail.

Only when he was purring and almost dry did she hear a wolf-whistle and whipped round. To her horror, lounging in the doorway, wearing only jeans and a highly amused smirk on his evil, debauched face was Viking. She had no idea how long he’d been there.

‘What in hell are you doing?’ she howled. ‘Ouch!’ she screamed as a terrified Sibelius dug his claws into her breasts.

‘I’ve just come down to make a cup of tea, Flora had a nightmare,’ said Viking.

‘Called Viking O’Neill,’ sobbed Abby.

Seizing her towel, crashing against the door to avoid touching him, she fled upstairs.

Poor Sibelius was mewing again, hoping for an early breakfast. Switching on the kettle, Viking picked him up. His face was expressionless, as burying it in the cat’s fur, he breathed in Abby’s scent.

Depressed that Abby seemed almost suicidal when he got up to wave her off, Marcus was cheered when the post brought a Christmas card from Taggie, containing three hundred pounds, smuggled out of her private account. But it didn’t make up for not hearing from Rupert, and Marcus was so cast down by an enchanting photograph in the Daily Express of Rupert, Taggie, Xav and Bianca arriving in Monhaut for a skiing Christmas, that Flora persuaded him to come home to Paradise and stay with her parents.

‘I shall be playing the referee’s whistle, so you can accompany me. We must drop off a bottle of whisky on the way for poor Eldred.’

Despite Viking ringing every day from Dublin, Flora was ashamed how thrilled she was to hear that Helen’s Christmas with Rannaldini’s ex-wives and brat-pack had been a disaster. She had never been gregarious, and Rannaldini’s endless sexual games had absolutely horrified her.

‘I could have told you Helen of Troilism wasn’t a viable proposition,’ quipped Flora.

Marcus was demented.

‘I should have gone out there to protect her.’

What Helen hadn’t told him was that for Christmas Rannaldini had given her a blank cheque to have her face, breasts and bottom lifted.

‘But you said in Prague you loved me as I am,’ sobbed Helen.

‘I did, and I know it will hurt dreadfully,’ purred Rannaldini, ‘but I want you to be even more beautiful.’

Also if Helen was confined to barracks recovering from surgery, it would give him more free time.

FORTY-FOUR

After their fortnight off the RSO sank into deep gloom. Life seemed to be summed up by Francis’s turkey which he had forgotten to take home and which was found in the band room under Nellie’s camisole top belching forth maggots.

Francis had other things on his mind. His house had been repossessed and he had moved into a council flat.

‘My children are on free dinners,’ he said wearily. ‘My milkman earns more than I do.’

Mary-the-mother-of-justin was horrified to find she was pregnant. Her husband had lost his smart job in television, and was at home looking after Justin and giving Mary a lot of grief.

Everyone except Carmine, Hilary and Juno had overspent at Christmas, couldn’t pay their bills and were chasing after fewer teaching jobs as the education departments slashed the music grants to colleges and schools.

Flora was delighted to have a letter from Eldred thanking her for the Christmas bottle of whisky, but worried that she got no answer when she kept ringing to invite him to supper. Finally police broke in on 4 January and found Eldred had been dead for a week from an overdose.

The empty bottle of whisky was at his feet, he was clutching his clarinet and the Mozart Trio, which he had obviously been planning to play with Flora and Marcus, was on the music-stand. The gramophone was still on — he had been listening to one of his old records.

‘If he hadn’t had his coffee black, people would have known from the milk bottles,’ sobbed Flora. ‘If I’d rung earlier I might have saved him.’

Everyone was too stunned and ashamed to oppose Hilary when she immediately applied for Eldred’s job of First Clarinet. She was soon busy auditioning candidates for Second Clarinet.

‘One should intercept them at the H.P. Hall gate,’ said Viking, ‘hissing: “escape while you can, don’t work with that bitch.”’

With her step-up to section leader, Hilary’s bossiness increased a thousand-fold. She was singing madrigals regularly with Miles, Gwynneth and Gilbert. Jogging round the Close with Miles kept her in good shape for running to him if there was any trouble.

The only good thing about Eldred’s death was that Abby and Flora made it up, united in their distress. Abby had already brought Flora some rosin, mixed with meteor dust, back from America as a Christmas present. Flora, more generous and much more guilty, had given Abby a scarlet cashmere polo-neck. She also tried to play down her raging and continuing affaire with Viking. Viking, as part of his ‘exorcize’ campaign, had given Flora a toy black sheep for Christmas called Rannaldini.

‘You’ve got to meet it head on, darling.’

Abby pretended she was no longer interested in Viking but, as a post-Christmas fitness regime, took to jogging round the lake. On her first Thursday back, her progress was impeded by the dustcart outside The Bordello. She nearly fell down a rabbit hole, as Viking hurtled out barefoot and just in jeans, his eyes swollen and practically closed with sleep, waving a twenty-pound note to persuade the dustmen to remove the battalions of empties.

As she jogged home, Abby could see Viking, Mr Nugent and all the dustmen across the lake, still standing outside The Bordello clutching beer cans and laughing uproariously. As a result Woodbine Cottage’s dustbins weren’t emptied until midday.

‘Viking’s teaching my lad the ’orn,’ boasted one of the dustmen. ‘He finks the world of Viking.’

‘His hobby seems to be ornithology,’ said Abby sourly.

The orchestra’s black gloom was not improved by increasingly sinister rumours of an intended merger between the CCO and the RSO flying around like seagulls above a plough. Cotchester Ballet Company, accompanied by the CCO, had been staging popular classics during the school-holidays and had pinched a large chunk of the RSO’s audience.

One Tuesday in the middle of January, George summoned Abby to his office. He was in a bad mood anyway. An ancient sitting tenant was frustrating his attempts to convert four adjacent freeholds in Park Lane into a splendid office block which would retain the early nineteenth-century façade. When the old biddy rejected a cash offer, George moved the heavies in to frighten her, whereupon she had called up the Daily Mirror, who had chewed George out in a double-page spread that morning.

George pulled no punches therefore when he told Abby the orchestra’s deficit was the largest ever. To win the audiences back they must ‘cross over’ which meant programming Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein and other non-classical music in the second half.

Abby was appalled.

‘We’re a symphony orchestra, for Chrissake.’

‘Not for much longer. It’s the only way we might survive. And I’m planning a huge gala centenary concert in May. I’ve already got feelers out for Dancer Maitland and Georgie Maguire.’

‘They’ll break the bank for starters. You know Georgie’s Flora’s mother?’

If George didn’t, he wasn’t going to admit it.

‘Can’t hold that against the poor woman,’ he said nastily. ‘Come in, Miles.’

Looking sanctimonious and disapproving, Miles sat down on a high-backed chair with his knees rammed together, and handed George some faxes. The first was a blank page from the Arts Council.

‘Is this supposed to be our next year’s grant?’ demanded George.

Miles smiled thinly.

‘The first page didn’t print out.’

The second page did and turned out to be a furious letter from Gilbert plus a photostat of a newspaper photograph of himself, Gwynneth, Peggy Parker and Sonny as portrayed by Dixie, Viking, Flora and Abby in the Christmas cabaret. Someone had obviously leaked it to the Rutminster Echo. The urn Viking was brandishing with ‘Clara’ written clearly on the side, had particularly offended Gilbert.

Just for a second George’s lips twitched, then he read on.

Now we know what your musicians think both of the Arts Council and their most generous patron. And when am I going to receive compensation for my cycle?

‘It was a bit of harmless fun,’ protested Abby.

‘Not harmless with next year’s grant about to be handed out,’ snapped George.

‘That bitch Hilary must have leaked it; she was taking photographs the whole time.’

‘Hilly wouldn’t do a thing like that,’ spluttered Miles. ‘Hilly only thinks of the good of the RSO, unlike some.’

‘Hilly’ now, thought Abby, they are getting thick.

Fortunately John Drummond chose that moment to seriously endanger a fifty-thousand-pound Perspex model of a neo-Tudor shopping precinct as he weaved round it. Landing with a thud on George’s knee, he started shredding Gilbert’s fax with his paws.

Abby burst out laughing, but was brought sharply back to earth by Miles, accusing her of taking no interest in the orchestra’s educational projects.

‘We must make musical excellence available to the widest possible audience,’ he added pompously.

‘As the last major educational project the RSO got involved in,’ snapped Abby, ‘was a search for Respighi’s Birds in the Forest of Dean, and Randy and Dixie and four schoolgirls vanished for over a week, I don’t figure this is feasible in January. They’d all die of hypothermia.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ said George, wincing as Druramond’s claws punctured his pin-striped thighs.

‘Anyway I haven’t got the time,’ countered Abby, ‘I’ve got far too much repertoire to learn.’

‘If we switched to more popular fare,’ Miles cracked his fingers, ‘you’d know it already.’

‘And you could start,’ George added curtly, ‘by wasting less time with Flora Seymour — she’s a pernicious influence.’

George had not forgiven Flora for Alphonso’s case, Gilbert’s bike or the musical socks which had played ‘Jingle Bells’ when he’d absent-mindedly tugged them up during a crucial meeting with the Department of the Environment.

‘She’s not your greatest fan either,’ said Abby disloyally.

‘Well, she better watch her back.’

‘Rather hard,’ said Miles bitchily, ‘when she Spends so much time on it. Nor did she help matters by suggesting in her letter of apology to Gilbert Greenford that he should replace Clara with a Harley Davidson.’

Abby laughed.

‘It is not funny,’ said Miles primly. ‘And as Musical Director you ought to be seen to do more for charity.’

Abby lost her temper.

‘All my spare cash, OK, goes to the Cats Protection League, and I don’t mean old tabby cats either,’ Abby glared pointedly at Miles. ‘Get off my back both of you.’

All the Perspex models trembled and John Drummond shot up the brushed suede wall as she walked out slamming the door.

Cooling down, she wandered into the general office and learnt from the notice-board that the RSO were currently doing a project at St Clement’s Primary School. As there was no rehearsal that morning she decided to pop in on the way home.

She was not cheered, switching on the car radio, to hear Hugo playing the violin solo in Mozart’s SinJonia Concertante.

‘That was the CCO, one of our great little orchestras,’ said Henry Kelly.

‘Oh, shut up,’ said Abby.

It had been raining for days. The River Fleet had flooded its banks, St Clement’s playing-fields were under water, inhibiting outdoor activity, which probably explained the unholy din issuing from the building.

When the secretary directed her to a far-off classroom, however, Abby was flabbergasted to find Viking perched on the edge of a desk telling a group of enraptured eight year olds about the French horn. They were engaged in a project on Rutminster in the seventeenth century.

‘Charles, the King of England, spent a lot of time fighting,’ Viking was saying. ‘And in the end he had his head chopped off, probably because his hair was longer than mine.’

The children laughed.

‘But, on his day off, he often enjoyed a day’s hunting in the Blackmere Woods and used a horn to sommon his hounds.’

Picking up his horn, Viking blew pa, pa, pa, pa on it.

‘This was a sound that the dogs could hear all over the forest.’

Nugent, who was sitting beside a little boy in a wheelchair, put his head on one side.

Seeing Abby, Viking gave a brief nod.

‘You can play the horn on anything,’ he went on, producing a piece of hose pipe from a Gap carrier bag.

Coiling it up, he handed one end to the little boy in the wheelchair and then played ‘God Save the Queen’ on the other.

Finally he made the children shriek with laughter by opening the teacher’s big handbag, which she’d left on top of the piano, and magicking out a red suspender belt, a pair of black lace knickers, a banana, a fluffy toy monkey, who pretended to eat the banana, and finally a huge bag of toffees which he handed round the class.

The teacher, who had a lot of freckles and a sweet open face, was clearly bats about him, too.

‘Viking’s a natural with kids,’ she told Abby. ‘Joey in the wheelchair’s really come out of himself since he’s been visiting us. These are the pictures they’ve been drawing.’ Proudly she pointed to a mural of Cavaliers, horses, jolly hounds, trees, wild flowers and a deer miles away with no chance of getting caught.

‘When that bully Carmine Jones came to teach an older class about the trumpet,’ the teacher lowered her voice, ‘they gave him such a rough ride, he came out nearly in tears.’

‘Could they give me their secret?’ sighed Abby.

As the bell went, Viking told the children they’d all got to make a valentine for their teacher.

‘Bye, sweetheart,’ he added, kissing her, ‘I’ll call you.’

Outside it was still raining and Viking tipped a black wool cap over his nose. It was a Christmas present from Rodney, who knew how Viking hated getting his hair wet because it kinked so unbecomingly. There had been rows in the past because Viking kept pinching Miss Priddock’s flowered sou’wester to go to the pub.

‘Let’s go and have a drink,’ he said, putting his arm through Abby’s.

The pub garden was filled with aconites and snowdrops. A hazel tree draping its sulphur-yellow catkins over the gate, like Zeus in a shower of gold waiting for Danaë, reminded Abby of Viking.

The pub was warm and dark. As she took refuge on a corner seat, she was glad she was wearing her new red cashmere polo-neck, but she was determined not in any way to betray to Viking how desperately she fancied him.

‘Thanks,’ she accepted a large glass of white wine, deliberately not allowing their fingers to touch.

Having downed a third of a pint of beer and wiped the froth off his lips with the back of his hand, Viking sat down at right angles to her, long legs so wide apart his knee nearly grazed hers, staring her out in amusement.

‘Well?’

‘That was kinda impressive,’ stammered Abby. ‘I never saw you as a Pied Piper.’

‘Music’s being left to die on its feet in schools,’ said Viking suddenly angry. ‘There’s no band any more, no singing, no hymns at compulsory Assembly. Kids can’t learn an instrument any longer unless their parents can afford the extra fees for lessons. Gradually the orchestras will die because there’ll no longer be a pool of bright young musicians to draw from.’

He shook his head, ‘Sorry, I’m getting heavy.’

‘No, it’s great,’ Abby was thrilled to glimpse a more serious Viking. ‘No thanks,’ she shook her head as he offered her a packet of crisps. ‘I’m also glad of a chance to talk. I wanted to discuss your section.’

‘You do?’

‘I just adore Cyril,’ went on Abby, ‘he was obviously a great musician once, but his lips have gone and he’s always drunk.’

‘That’s an exaggeration,’ said Viking coldly.

‘Well, he reeks of booze.’

‘He retires in four years’ time.’

‘Why can’t he teach?’

‘Too shy. Those kids today would make dog-meat out of him.’

Abby took a gulp of wine to strengthen her resolve.

‘He’s pulling back the orchestra.’

‘The orchestra’ll have to pull a bit harder then. I don’t want to discoss it.’

The most delectable smells were wafting in from the kitchen. Abby proceeded to lecture him and Viking to disagree with her, until a barmaid in a tight gentian-blue sweater and an emerald-green mini skirt came over with the menu.

‘D’you want to order, Viking?’

‘I’m not sure. That’s a fantastic sweater.’ Then, turning to Abby, asked, ‘Do you want some lunch?’

Abby shook her head irritably.

‘I’ve got far too much work.’

Viking smiled up at the waitress. ‘Can I have my bill?’

‘Irish stew’s delicious. I could do you a take-away.’

Viking eyed her up. ‘There are things I’d rather take away.’

The waitress giggled. ‘I’ll get you your bill.’

‘Can’t you pass anything up?’ snapped Abby.

She was still lecturing him about his profligate lifestyle as they reached the car-park. Viking took her car keys and opened her door.

‘I’m sorry to get heavy,’ muttered Abby, ‘but I don’t want you to hurt Flora, she was absolutely blown away by Rannaldini.’

Viking looked at Abby in that amused wicked testing way until she had turned as red as her jersey.

‘I won’t hurt Flora,’ he said softly. ‘I adore her, she’s a soul mate; stonningly gorgeous and amazingly loyal to you,’ he added sharply.

‘Then why do you do a number on every woman you meet?’

‘Don’t you think my numbers add up to the sum of human happiness?’ Turning, Viking waved to two of the barmaids who were still gazing at him out of the pub window.

‘I don’t know,’ said Abby crossly, ‘I guess you’re just a womanizer.’

‘I’m not a womanizer,’ said Viking, ‘I’m a charmer!’

Grabbing her, he kissed her on the mouth, sticking his tongue down her throat. Putting up absolutely no resistance Abby kissed him back until her pulses were thundering like the nearby mill-stream and she could hardly stand up.

But, as she pulled away to draw breath, Viking let her go.

‘Only way to shot you up, darling.’ Laughing, he sauntered off towards his car.

Back at the cottage, Marcus was listening to Pablo Gonzales playing Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto.

‘How perfect, how effortless, how beautiful. Oh Christ,’ he was saying.

He was slowly getting to grips with the concerto and only occasionally allowed himself to listen to recordings, terrified of being over-influenced.

‘It’s a bit quick,’ said Flora, who was combing tangles out of a protesting Scriabin, ‘I prefer Kissin — more languorous and tender.’

‘I like Kissin’s applause at the end,’ sighed Marcus.

‘What can we do this afternoon to stop me eating?’ pleaded Flora, who was on a diet. Whichever way she’d put her knickers on that morning they had felt back to front.

She suspected she was stuffing her face because Rannaldini had just won the coveted Conductor of the Year Award. Under his direction, the New World had won Orchestra of the Year, and Winifred Trapp’s Harp Concertos, newly released, were receiving ecstatic reviews. Flora couldn’t open a paper without Rannaldini’s face glaring out at her.

She didn’t feel any better when Abby floated in.

‘Just been having a drink with Viking.’

‘Where did you meet him?’ asked Flora.

‘He was teaching at St Clement’s — good to see him occupying his time profitably for a change, I cannot understand people who are super-talented and lazy.’

‘I can,’ said Flora, taking a tub of ice-cream out of the freezer.

‘And don’t you get mad at the way he chats up every woman he meets?’

‘No-oh,’ said Flora, seizing a spoon.

‘Viking’s attractive, I’ll grant you that. George chewed me out earlier this morning, but I guess underneath his animosity, he’s kinda attracted to me, like Viking is, or he wouldn’t bully me so much.’

‘That’s a false argument,’ said Flora with her mouth full. ‘Carmine bullies Cathie.’

‘I figure George would be a better bet than Viking,’ reflected Abby.

‘Georgie, Porgie, Black Pudding and Pie,’ Flora took another large spoonful. ‘If it was a choice between Mr Wrong but Romantic O’Neill and Mr Right but Repulsive Hungerford, I know who I’d choose.’

‘It’s weird; George doesn’t like you either,’ said the ever-tactful Abby.

Marcus winced. He wished Abby’s almost pathological jealousy of Flora didn’t make her so bitchy. He knew that she’d regret this conversation later.

‘Oh hell,’ said Flora, miserably, looking down at the empty ice-cream tub and chucking it into the sink. The telephone rang.

‘It’s Mr Wrong but Romantic,’ a returning Marcus gave a faint smirk, ‘for Flora.’

‘I’ve just kissed Abby,’ were Viking’s first words.

‘I guessed,’ said Flora.

‘She was listing my shortcomings.’

‘Your comings are never short.’ Flora was happy to hear Viking’s relieved laughter.

‘I love you and need you,’ he begged, ‘come over at once. I’d come and collect you, but I don’t want any more lectures.’

Abby couldn’t hide her exasperation.

‘Tell Viking to keep that damn dog under control. He’s always round here upending dustbins, just like his master.’