Score!

15

Before her first recording Flora spent the night with Abby and Viking, who had practically to drug and drag her screaming into his car to get her to Wallsend Town Hall, which had grown even colder, the icicles outside even longer. The red-nosed chorus, in their overcoats, looked like carol singers.

Flora was supposed to take over where Rozzy had not started: in the Forest of Fontainebleau with Hermione and Baby, but as a dreadful anticlimax, Hermione had just rung in for the second day running saying that the broken toe she’d sustained in her collision with Alpheus was much worse.

Tristan was so angry for Flora that he drove much too fast over icy roads back into London to the Lanesborough. Thundering on the door of Hermione’s suite he was admitted by her excited PA. Hearing shrieks of agony, he thought he had misjudged his leading lady, but barging into her bedroom, found her having her legs waxed. To Hermione’s fury, he immediately insisted she and one hairy leg return with him to Wallsend.

Flora, meanwhile, had been immensely comforted to find a good-luck card in her dressing room from Serena’s new PA, Rozzy Pringle. She was attempting to get her trembling lips round a few arpeggios, when Rozzy herself rushed in with a mug of hot Ribena.

‘Hello, my poor lamb, you mustn’t be frightened. You’ve got such a lovely voice. I’ve studied the role so if you need any help… I have to confess,’ Rozzy went on, as she hung Flora’s blue scarf on a hanger, ‘I was prepared to hate you because my husband, Glyn, is so in love with your mother, he’s got all her records.’

‘I’ll get him an advance copy of her next album,’ promised Flora. ‘We’re all huge fans of yours.’

‘Come and meet Granville Hastings,’ said Rozzy. ‘He’s such a darling.’

‘Why are there so many people here?’ muttered an aghast Flora.

‘You’ve turned up on the worst possible day,’ whispered back Rozzy indignantly. ‘By constantly ignoring poor Tristan’s schedule and pulling out people to sing as and when he felt like it, Rannaldini’s created the most appalling backlog. All the rest of the cast are here in case they have to do retakes. Poor Tristan!’

They found Granny regaling an audience with chitchat.

‘My dear child, welcome.’ He put down his knitting to give Flora a kiss.

‘Where the hell’s Rannaldini?’ Even the normally ebullient Baby was uptight over all the hanging around.

‘Having a poke, I expect,’ sighed Granny. ‘He always poked the prettiest chorus girls at the Garden, bending them over the red velvet balcony of the royal box between rehearsals. If anyone came by, he used to pretend he was showing them round the opera-house.’

Granny rose, still knitting, and went into a sequence of languid pelvic thrusts. ‘Down there ees the peet, where my orchestra play [thrust], and zat is rostrum where I perform miracle [thrust], and zat is proscenium arch [thrust].’

‘When you ’ave feenish, Granville,’ said a chilling voice.

The laughter died. Granny dropped several stitches.

‘Dame ’Ermione soldier in. At least ’ave the courtesy not to keep her waiting.’ Rannaldini glared round.

‘Anyone got a Fisherman’s Friend?’ came Hermione’s pathetic bleat.

Limping ostentatiously, she joined Baby and Flora on the platform.

‘Just like the Teddy Bears’ Picnic,’ hissed Flora, glaring at Hermione’s full-length mink.

‘I assure you, this will be no picnic,’ hissed back Baby.

Rannaldini just had to stand there. His cruel, cold, pale, malevolent face was enough to give a performance its special edge. He raised his stick. Viking’s dying horn call floated out of the bar.

Flora was so terrified she began loud and sharp. It didn’t take Rannaldini long to put the boot in. After the fifth take, when she’d finally got the notes right, he said, ‘That was better, Flora, but you are expected to act.’

Flora flushed. ‘But I thought—’

‘Don’t,’ said Rannaldini crushingly. ‘You do not have the necessary equipment,’ he added bitchily. ‘To be a singer you have to have a voice. To be a musician you have to have a brain. Don’t confuse the two.’

There is a limited number of times you can ask a singer to repeat herself and get the words, notes and acting right. Rannaldini exceeded it. Flora was also slimming, and the rare perfect take was invariably wrecked by her rumbling tummy.

‘This is hopeless,’ yelled Rannaldini, calling a lunch break. ‘We will finish scene tomorrow.’

The last day was even more tempestuous, particularly when George Hungerford rolled up with Trevor, Flora’s terrier, and sat at the back of the hall scowling at Rannaldini. Flora got even more flustered, particularly when Trevor started howling at Hermione’s rather dubious top notes, which reduced both chorus and cast to fits of laughter, so master and dog were banished from the hall.

‘That nasty little dog is, alas, a critic,’ said Serena, as she picked up the telephone in the control room to ring Rannaldini on the rostrum. ‘Dame Hermione has lost her top.’

‘Where? Where?’ said Sexton, looking round the control room in excitement.

‘Her top notes, you bloody idiot.’ Serena slammed down the receiver.

Rannaldini decided to take a break and listen to the playback. Tristan bore George off for ‘a cup of tea and a piece of shortbread for Trevor’.

Smarmy frog even knows the name of my dog, thought George ungratefully.

‘And then you can sit in the control room,’ added Tristan.

‘No, he can’t,’ snapped Serena, who’d nipped down to the canteen to grab a cup of tea, and who hadn’t forgiven George for choosing to live with Flora rather than her. ‘Our singers’ weaknesses and how we conceal them are entirely our secret.’

‘Weaknesses?’ squawked Hermione, who, having clocked Rannaldini’s preference for Serena, had been spoiling for a fight. ‘What weaknesses? How dare you, you patronizing hussy?’ Grabbing cups and saucers, she started smashing them on the floor.

‘Pull yourself together, Hermione,’ said Serena bossily. ‘My little Jessie wouldn’t behave like that.’

Appearing in the doorway, Rannaldini ducked to avoid a milk jug and frogmarched a screaming Hermione off to her dressing room. Three minutes later, he came out zipping up his flies.

‘She’ll be OK now.’

‘But we’re going to have to drop in someone else’s top notes,’ whispered Serena.

Tristan decided to placate George with a large whisky instead and bore him off to find one.

‘Flora is wonderful,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘She is determined not to betray her panic to Elisabetta, but listen to the tension in her voice.’

‘She’s not having to act,’ snarled George, ‘and who’s that damn sight too good-looking boy playing Carlos?’

‘Baby Spinosissimo. He’s sublime, but extremely gay.’

The ladies of the chorus, who were not needed in the finale, were drifting away. Pushy’s hard little heart was breaking as she knocked on Rannaldini’s door.

‘Ay’ve just come to say goodbay, Maystro.’

‘My dear, can you keep a secret on pain of death?’

‘Of course,’ lied Pushy, wriggling inside.

‘How would you like to sing Dame Hermione’s top notes?’

At last the recording was over. Tristan heaved a sigh of relief that Rannaldini would now whizz off round the world out of their hair, allowing himself, Serena and Sylvestre to get on with the editing.

But, to his horror, Rannaldini went nowhere, hogging the edit suite, putting his stamp on everything, causing endless rows over which take was used, twiddling knobs so some singers sounded less good and others better than they had at the recording. Granny, getting to the end of his career, needed careful editing. Hermione, as Rannaldini’s mistress and more importantly because of their mutual record sales, couldn’t sound less than perfect. Sylvestre dropped in Pushy’s top notes so no-one could detect the join.

Still disappointed that Tristan hadn’t made a move, Serena put it down to the fact that she had supported Rannaldini on every artistic decision. She had also, reluctantly, become very smitten with her Italian stallion. It was so sweet of Rannaldini on the last day of editing, because her involvement in the film was ended, to invite her, Sylvestre and Tristan back to his flat overlooking Hyde Park for a farewell dinner.

As Serena was leaving to relieve the babysitter, because it was Nanny Bratislava’s night off, she handed Rannaldini a picture her daughter Jessie had painted specially for her ‘Uncle Roberto’.

‘How charming of Jessie,’ Rannaldini wiped away a tear, and as he ushered Serena into her minicab, promised he would call her later.

Bounding back into the house, however, he rolled up Jessie’s picture, plunged it into the drawing-room fire and lit his cigar with it.

‘What are you doing?’ demanded Tristan in horror.

‘Now the recording is sewn up,’ Rannaldini inhaled happily, ‘I have no more need to ingratiate myself with little Jessie’s mother.’

There were more fireworks in March when members of the cast were issued with cassettes of themselves singing so they could learn the words to which they had to mime on location and time their movements to them. Then they discovered how much Rannaldini had doctored the recording. Chloe was incensed by the cuts in the ‘Veil Song’ and in ‘Don Fatale’.

Rannaldini blithely blamed Serena.

‘Anyway, those numbers don’t add much to the plot, my darling.’

Baby was outraged he’d been so often drowned by Hermione. Alpheus felt Rannaldini had consistently favoured the orchestra and every other singer. It was sacrilege to cut his great solo in Act IV and his character didn’t ‘garner sufficient sympathy’.

Mikhail was so cross, he rang up Rannaldini in the middle of the night. ‘Why did you not use my third and best take in death of Posa?’

‘Because it was too slow,’ said Rannaldini coolly. ‘Serena wanted to get Acts Four and Five on to one CD for when the record comes out.’

‘At this rate my billing will be so small and low down, only snails and mice will be able to read it,’ sighed Granny, who’d also been savagely cut.

‘Think of poor Verdi,’ snarled Rannaldini. ‘He had to drop the entire first act of Don Carlos, because the Parisians couldn’t get their last trains home.’

‘And directors have been putting it back ever since,’ said Granny drily.

Sylvestre, the handsome French sound engineer, felt Hermione’s performance had been so enhanced by subtle additions that he sent her her cassette with utter confidence. In a frenzy Hermione returned the tape by taxi, shrieking down the telephone and threatening legal action. ‘You have rejected every single take I wanted and my top notes sound terrible.’

Sylvestre waited four days, wrote to Hermione saying he’d laboured all round the clock on a new tape, and sent her back the old one. By return of post, he received from Hermione a letter, which he framed, saying, ‘You have worked miracles.’ Also included was an invitation to luncheon, which lasted twenty-four hours.

There was great consternation when a hatchet job, on the horrors of recording with Rannaldini, appeared in the Sunday Times, written by little Christy Foxe. As Christy subsequently turned out to be Rupert Campbell-Black’s godson, and the son of Janey Lloyd-Foxe, a very dangerous columnist, Rannaldini and Tristan wondered uneasily if this were the first round in Rupert’s war of attrition.