Score!

13

The next drama to rock the recording was when Rozzy Pringle finally turned up to sing Tebaldo, Elisabetta’s page. A seventies beauty, the doe-eyed, long-legged Rozzy was so like Celia Johnson that everyone had wanted to have unbrief encounters with her. She was much too old for the part, but at least she’d make Hermione look young, and she had a host of fans.

Granny and Rannaldini, who’d often worked with her, admired her inordinately. Serena and Alpheus had long collected her records. On the other hand, Hermione disliked all other sopranos on principle, and Mikhail, Baby and Chloe, being from a younger generation, scoffed that Rozzy was past it.

Tristan was livid with them. Enchanted at the prospect of working with one of his heroines, he filled Rozzy’s dressing room with spring flowers.

But when Rozzy finally came through the door, on a dank, grey, viciously cold morning, he was appalled. She looked old enough to be Hermione’s grandmother, and was purple with cold to match the darned violet blazer she was wearing over her long, flowered dress. To combat the ageing hippie look, she had curled up her hair but it had dropped in the fog, and fell in lank straight tresses over her jutting collarbones. Everyone greeted her effusively to conceal their shock.

‘Hi, Rozzy, I’m such a fan,’ said Chloe, clanking cheeks. Then, ten seconds later to Baby, ‘She must have lied about her age in Who’s Who. She’ll never see fifty again.’

Having thrust a beautifully wrapped present into Tristan’s hand, ‘a little something because you’re so kind to book me’, Rozzy fled to the loo.

‘Such a drag having Rozzy Pringle here, stinking out the lav again,’ grumbled Hermione, half an hour later, as little Christy Foxe propelled her towards the microphone.

‘You have to move to mike four, next to Baby, in bar forty-five, Dame Hermione,’ he reminded her for the tenth time. Then, consulting his score, he said, smiling at Rozzy as she crept grey and shaking out of her dressing room, ‘You start off standing twelve feet from mike two, then move up close to mike three, Mrs Pringle.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Tristan put his bomber jacket round Rozzy’s trembling shoulders. ‘Tebaldo’s just as petrified as you in this scene. Just make sure those opening “Hey theres” really ring out.’

Rozzy, Baby and Hermione were all in place, their breath rising in white plumes as Rannaldini swept in.

‘Morning, Rozzy, lovely to have you with us. Shall we catch up over a spot of lunch?’ he called out, eliciting scowls from Serena, Pushy and Hermione.

It was too early for the offstage band, waiting in the bar, to have got drunk. Seeing Rannaldini raise his stick on the monitor, Viking O’Neill came in with the mournful, fading sob of the departing hunting horn.

‘“All is silent, night approaches, and the first star glitters on the horizon,”’ sang Baby, who worked the mike like a rock star.

Now they’ll eat their bitchy words, thought Tristan, as Rannaldini nodded, smiling at Rozzy, but despite her anguished face and frenzied mouthings, no ‘Hey theres’ came out.

Rannaldini halted the orchestra.

‘Rozzy?’

‘Sorry, Maestro.’

‘From the top.’ He raised his baton.

Viking’s horn, then Baby, both hauntingly exquisite, were followed by silence, and a dreadful, strangulated croak.

‘Relax, Rozzy, one, two, three,’ called Rannaldini.

Rozzy’s heart was crashing, the blood pumping through her veins, but her throat was drier than the desert. Even after ten minutes of struggling, all she could produce were scraping gasps. Tristan, in the control room, felt as if he was watching a dog, whose vocal cords had been cut in the vivisection clinic, trying to cry out as the surgeon’s knife went in. By the time he had run down into the hall, Rannaldini had lost his temper.

‘How dare you call yourself a professional singer?’ he was screaming.

‘You’ve let us all down,’ reproached Hermione, as Rozzy fled to her dressing room, her body racked as much with coughing as with sobs.

Rannaldini picked up the telephone to the control room.

‘Who booked her, for Christ’s sake?’

‘You and Tristan did,’ snapped Serena. ‘We’re going to have to reschedule.’

‘Tebaldo was my favourite part at college,’ piped up Pushy.

Rozzy’s present to Tristan was a cushion, green velvet on one side, the other exquisitely embroidered with the words, ‘The Lily in the Valley’.

Tristan couldn’t bear unhappiness. Leaving everyone fighting, and Baby and Hermione to finish their duet, he drove Rozzy to Harley Street with his car heater turned up.

She had had a terrible Christmas, she revealed, between sobs, yelling at insolent stepchildren, placating Glyn, her idle husband, coping with his frightful mother, who kept commiserating with him for being neglected by a wife who was always selfishly pursuing a career. Matters had not been helped when Rozzy had nipped off on 28 December to sing Mimì in a cheap Hungarian production to pay a tax bill, before singing Brünnhilde, with laryngitis, in Athens three days later. Brünnhilde’s immolation scene had done for her.

Why the fuck did you risk it? Tristan wanted to shout.

The throat specialist said Rozzy had thoroughly overstrained her voice. He couldn’t promise that it would come back and she certainly couldn’t sing in the recording.

Seated in Tristan’s car once more, Rozzy cried so hard that passers-by — swept down Harley Street by the north wind — gazed in horror.

‘People will think I am woman-beater,’ grumbled Tristan, and drove her to his flat overlooking Regent’s Park, which glittered with hoar frost in the midday sun. All round the walls of the sitting room were propped photographs of the cast.

‘I like to live with my characters,’ explained Tristan.

‘Past and present,’ said Rozzy, picking up a large photograph of Claudine Lauzerte in its own silver frame. ‘I wish I looked as good as that now.’ Wincing, as she glanced in the mirror she wiped mascara from under her eyes. ‘People used to say Claudine and I were a little alike.’

‘A little.’ Tristan smiled as he handed her a vast Bloody Mary.

She looked half starved. He couldn’t have her blubbing all over a restaurant. He’d been too uptight himself to eat the Chinese takeaway he’d brought home last night. Perhaps he could heat it up for Rozzy.

‘I’m sorry to be such a drip,’ she said, following him into the kitchen. ‘Yesterday I discovered Glyn had appropriated thirty thousand pounds I’d saved for my tax bill to subsidize some dodgy property deal.

‘He’s also employed an incredibly pretty temporary housekeeper called Sylvia at vast expense for the few days I was going to be away recording Carlos. This morning I took my mother-in-law Go-Cat in her breakfast bowl instead of muesli…’ Rozzy started to cry again.

‘You’re just overtired,’ said Tristan, putting an arm round her shoulders. ‘I found my washing in the dishwasher this morning, and my car keys in the fridge.’

He let her run on as he got out the takeaway. The waxy topping of orange fat looked disgusting.

‘I can’t go home tonight,’ Rozzy was whispering to herself. ‘Glyn’ll think I’m spying on him and Sylvia. Oh, Tristan, what are we going to live on if I can’t sing any more?’

For once when his mobile rang Tristan was relieved.

It was Baby in ecstasy, and having a large vodka, because Christy Foxe, who’d been such a trooper, had finally walked out.

‘He was fed up shunting Hermione around,’ explained Baby, ‘Rannaldini being so vile to Rozzy was the final straw. The brave little lad got up and sang “The Prisoners’ Chorus” from Fidelio. After he’d gone, he sent Rannaldini a message on his bleeper, saying, “Stuff job up your ass, rude letter to follow.”’

Tristan started to laugh.

‘After Christy walked out,’ went on Baby gleefully, ‘Alpheus, too vain to put on his glasses and too busy ogling Pushy Galore, failed to read Christy’s last pencil note on the score saying, “Please move back here, Herd of Elephant coming through”, so Dame Hermione ran slap into him. Hermione is now suing for a broken toe, Alpheus for a broken rib. I think you’d better find another PA, Tristan.’

Grinning and shaking his head, Tristan switched off his mobile.

‘We’re in luck. You can stay on at the Capital, and take over Christy’s job. You know Don Carlos backwards. And because you’re wonderful at sewing — that is most beautiful cushion I ever have — when we go on location, you can stop Griselda, the wardrobe mistress, having nervous breakdown. And to keep you on the cast list,’ Tristan chucked the takeaway cartons in the bin, ‘you can have the non-singing role of the Countess of Aremberg. All you’ll have to do is cry when the King sacks you, and you’re very good at that. Come on, I’ll buy you lunch.’

Rozzy got to her feet unsteadily. As he caught her before she fell, Tristan felt her desperate boniness.

‘You are the kindest person I’ve ever met,’ she said, in a choked voice.

Sexton and Serena, however, shook their heads at such unilateral brokering of a deal, and Rannaldini went ballistic at such prodigality: a singer’s salary for a neurotic geriatric PA.

That night, in revenge for Alpheus ogling Pushy, Chloe invited Sylvestre, Tristan’s handsome blond sound engineer, back to the Capital and discovered he was as good at twiddling knobs in bed as out. Afterwards, as they shared a bottle of Dom Pérignon on Liberty Productions, Sylvestre sighed that Tristan was too kind for his own good.

‘We had location manager on Lily in the Valley so useless he couldn’t find his own cock. Tristan called him into his caravan to sack him, but he spent so much time listing his good points so as not to demoralize him that the guy came out three hours later convinced he’d been promoted.’

More seriously, they were now without a page who, in Tristan’s new present-day version, had become a bodyguard. Tebaldo is not a huge part, but a vital one, a larky little fellow, usually played by a charming gamin.

Pushy Galore came forward immediately, ringlets and ribbons flying. She knew the part, could she audition? Rannaldini, Sexton, and Alpheus were all keen.

‘Give the young woman a chance,’ urged Hermione, because she knew it would irritate Chloe, who longed secretly to be admired and promoted by Hermione.

Serena, however, wanted to kick in Pushy’s buck teeth, because she was always making eyes at Rannaldini, and Tristan thought her ghastly and far too refined to play a bodyguard.

The argument was at full throttle in the control room when Viking wandered in. Despite their earlier differences, he had played like an angel throughout the sessions, and he and Rannaldini had achieved a grudging, if transient, respect.

‘Here’s one soprano who isn’t working at the moment.’ He chucked a photograph on the table.

The girl wore an ivory silk shift. She had a shiny dark red bob, pale gold skin sprinkled with freckles like a tiger lily, and cool, watchful green eyes.

Viking put a tape in the machine. Her voice was of such piercing, distinctive sweetness that Tristan had to hear only a few bars.

‘Bravo, Viking, who is she?’

‘Flora Seymour — she’s Georgie Maguire’s daughter, so it’s in the genes. She played the viola in my old orchestra, but trained as a singer as well. She’s got the most angelic voice in the world.’

‘Give me her telephone number,’ said Tristan.

He met a lot of opposition. Serena, Hermione and Chloe all thought Flora was a tramp, probably because she’d had affaires with both Rannaldini and Viking, and because they’d all three had designs in the past on the filthy rich, if slightly shady, George Hungerford, with whom Flora was now living.

Rannaldini didn’t want any advice from Viking and he’d fallen out badly with Flora. But he doted on her voice, which had never been properly exploited. He was enough of a mischief-maker as well to see the potential for avenging himself on Flora’s lover, George Hungerford, who as managing director of the Rutminster Symphony Orchestra had foiled Rannaldini’s takeover bid and who, as a developer, was also threatening to slap a motorway through Valhalla.

Sexton, who was watching the mounting costs in horror, was in favour because Flora sounded cheap.

‘How d’you know her so well?’ asked Tristan.

‘I was once hopelessly in love with her,’ said Viking.

Answering his mobile, he wandered out of earshot to speak to his new wife. ‘Abby darling, I love you too. I’ve also been matchmaking,’ he lowered his voice. ‘I’ve posted Tristan de Montigny down to Rutminster Hall to see Flora.’