He was glad when the birds started singing in the pale green trees during the interval, restoring normality. From the sloping woods on either side rose tier on tier of starry, wild garlic, its pungent smell mingling with lilac and soapy hawthorn making it increasingly difficult for him to breathe.
Glancing into the audience as she and Declan took a final call, Abby was touched to see Marcus’s face still wet with tears. He loved her so much and felt things so deeply. After the gala they would have more time.
In fact the only blot on a perfect evening for Abby continued to be Viking. Incensed to be confined to a pit where he couldn’t be gazed at or ogle every girl in the stalls, he had rigged up a driving mirror on the front of his music-stand so he could watch Georgie and Declan and no doubt later gaze up Evgenia’s skirt.
Worse was to come. After Tchaikovsky’s
Fifth
, Georgie returned to sing two of Strauss’s
Four Last Songs
, before starting the VE Day numbers.
Locked in Georgie’s dressing-room, Trevor stopped howling and decided if he took a Nemerovsky leap he could land on a chair and then take another leap onto the table underneath the open window.
Mr Nugent, on the other hand, had been allowed to wait in the wings, front paws together, gazing lovingly down at his master in the pit, trying not to interrupt his beautiful horn solo by panting. Suddenly Nugent stiffened and gave a muffled growl. His enemy Trevor was jauntily approaching from the other side of the stage, only pausing to lift his leg on one of Peggy Parker’s flower arrangements, fox-brown eyes searching everywhere for Flora. The audience nudged each other in ecstasy. Recognizing Flora’s mother, who’d given him chewstiks and cold beef, Trevor bounded forward, wagging his curly tail.
‘
Long by the roses
,’ sang Georgie with clasped hands, ‘
she lingers yearning for peace
.’
No-one was going to get any peace with Trevor around. Suddenly he clocked another enemy, Abby, waving a stick at eye-level, and proceeded to yap noisily, increasing in volume when Abby refused to throw the stick and even hissed at him to eff off.
All this was too much for Nugent. Shuffling out onto the stage on his belly, he attempted to round Trevor up and off the stage. Affronted, Trevor flew at Nugent’s throat, catching mostly shaggy black fur. Nugent was normally the most pacific of dogs, but dignity offended, he weighed in, and furious growling was relayed by speakers all over the ground as though every hound in hell had been unleashed.
In fits of laughter and with great presence of mind, Georgie grabbed Peggy Parker’s nearest flower vase and emptied three hundred pounds’ worth of lilies over Trevor and Nugent, who took absolutely no notice. There was no alternative but for a cringing Viking to clamber onto the stage and separate them. The crowd, already in stitches, were then treated to the edifying sight of the hero of the RSO in a beautifully pressed cream dinner-jacket and snow-white evening-shirt and, because he hadn’t expected his lower half to be seen in the pit, torn espadrilles and boxer shorts covered in fornicating frogs. What really upset Viking was that he hadn’t had time to brown his white legs. To a chorus of jeers and wolf-whistles he grabbed both dogs.
‘Come off it, ye basstards.’ And then, because Trevor was appropriately hanging on like a pit bull, Viking kicked him sharply in the ribs.
‘Don’t you hurt my dog, you fucking bully.’
The next moment Flora, who also hadn’t expected anyone to see her lower half, wearing only her crimson jacket flapping loose from its top button, and a patriotic pair of Union Jack knickers, had joined him on stage to more screams of laughter and roars of applause.
‘Talk about the black hole of “
Oh Calcutta
,”’ yelled Dixie.
‘Drop, Trevor, drop,’ screamed Flora, kicking Nugent as hard as she could with her bare feet.
‘Who’s the great fucking bully now?’ shouted Viking.
Only when Georgie, who was now even more hysterical with laughter than the audience, emptied the contents of another flower vase over both dogs
and
their owners, did Trevor release his grip. Whereupon Flora, clutching her dog like a furiously yapping handbag, and Viking frantically examining Nugent’s face and shoulders for gashes, continued to hurl abuse at each other, until George Hungerford marched on hissing: ‘Get those fooking dogs off stage at once,’ and seized the microphone to deafening cheers. He tried to diffuse the situation quickly by apologizing both to Georgie and the crowd.
‘I’m afraid everyone, including pooches, gets overwrought in this heat.’
In agreement Trevor peered round Flora’s arm and growled furiously at Nugent. Another great cheer went up:
‘What a dreadful, dreadful circus,’ said Gilbert appalled.
‘Thank goodness Sonny’s out of it, Peggy,’ said Gwynneth patting Peggy Parker’s hand.
Georgie seized the microphone.
‘It’s all my fault,’ she told the audience, ‘Trevor belongs to Flora, my daughter, who plays in the orchestra.’
‘Oh Mum.’ Departing Flora clutched her head with the hand that wasn’t clutching Trevor.
‘He’s a rescued dog, and clearly felt insecure locked up in my dressing-room,’ went on Georgie, ‘but he rescued me, I was having hellish problems with that Strauss song, so let’s get on with VE Day.’
Trevor and Nugent were soon forgotten. The sun set in a ball of flame. The polo field became a mass of waving Union Jacks as Georgie started belting out: ‘Roll out the Barrel’, ‘We’ll Meet Again’ and ‘There’ll be Blue Birds Over The White Cliffs of Dover’ until Declan joined her on stage, taking it in turns to dry each other’s eyes.
‘We really ought to be singing “The Rising of the Moon” to strike a balance,’ murmured Declan. Finally they brought the house down with ‘The Lambeth Walk’.
After a dressing down from George that neither of them would ever forget, Viking and Flora slunk back into the pit. Trevor and Nugent were now in the care of Harve the Heavy.
‘And if I get any more trouble out of you,’ George roared at Flora, ‘he’ll feed that bloody little dog of yours to my Rottweilers.’
Great jubilation resulted when it was relayed over the loud speakers that Rannaldini and Hermione had netted only half the RSO’s audience that night. The moment the Opera Gala was over, members of the audience had raced over from Cotchester and were already climbing trees, or crushing the wild garlic as they crept down through the woods, to catch a glimpse of the great Nemerovsky.
George, however, had a huge problem on his hands. Evgenia made up and ravishing in old rose chiffon, her dark hair embroidered with pearls and gold ribbon, had been ready for an hour. But Alexei was refusing to come out of his dressing-room. Not only had he insulted Gilbert and Gwynneth and blacked the eye of a
Scorpion
reporter who’d tried, through his dressing-room window, to do a Trevor in reverse, but he’d taken a passionate dislike to Miles.
‘Are you ready to dance, Mr Nemerovsky?’
‘No, I am not ready to dance, fuck off.’
‘Of course he’s not ready,’ said Viking scornfully, ‘fake tan takes at least eight hours to work.’
‘You should know,’ hissed Abby.
Convinced she was the only person who could coax Alexei out, she had been bitterly humiliated when he’d dispatched her as summarily as everyone else.
The concert was already running an hour late, which so far had only increased the bar takings and the anticipation. But Abby’s head would be on the block if Alexei didn’t deliver.
Outside Alexei’s dressing-room, George’s resolve was stiffened by the sight of Evgenia next door. Slumped on the floor in her beautiful dress, stretching and leaning forward to keep herself supple, smoking too many cigarettes, then cleaning her teeth till her gums bled because Alexei hated the smell of smoke, attacking increasing beads of sweat with a huge powder puff, she had been driven ragged by the delay and by Alexei’s monumental selfishness. The longer the wait, the greater the entrance.
Knocking on Alexei’s door, ignoring the snarl to fuck off, George went in.
‘We need to start, Alexei.’
Alexei’s belongings: track-suit bottoms, towels, books, tapes, shoes spilled out of suitcases all over the floor. Fully made up, wearing his wolf-coat over his Romeo costume of white tights and floppy green transparent shirt, Alexei shivered convulsively as he listened to Britten’s
War Requiem
on his walkman for the fifth time that day.
And George was suddenly reminded of a ram who’d strayed off the moors into his nan’s parlour, during a bitterly cold winter, who had knocked over all the furniture and the knick-knacks, reducing the room to a shambles before leaping straight out through the big sash-window.
George had never forgotten the combined terror and ferocity of that ram and looking at Alexei, he realized he wasn’t bloody minded, just shit-scared.
‘Always eet is same, why do I put ass on the line? No-one who doesn’t dance, understand the cold sweat, the fear.’
‘You haven’t faced the RSO in a bad mood or Rutminster Council when you’re trying to pull a fast one,’ George tried to lighten the conversation.
‘Is not comparable.’ Haughtily Alexei glared at George as if he was the village idiot. ‘Will I remember the steps? Will I bore the audience? Am I too old to play Romeo?’
In the still face, the black eyes rolled like marbles.
‘You’re the best in the world.’
Alexei shrugged. ‘Is millstone, eef you are best you must always be bettair.’
Plonking himself in the second armchair, George lit a cigar.
‘Please don’t smoke.’
George hastily put it out.
‘When I was first married,’ he said, ‘we had no money. We saved and saved either to hear Harefield sing—’
Alexei looked outraged. ‘That screeching beech.’
‘Or to see you dance. We saw you in
Giselle
at Covent Garden. We couldn’t afford a meal out afterwards, didn’t matter, we couldn’t have eaten anything we were so excited, we could hardly speak on the way home. It was truly the best evening of my marriage.’
‘That was fifteen years ago, I am old now.’ Sulkily Alexei turned to the mirror, picking up a cotton bud to tidy up a smudged eye-line. George admired the long eyelashes sweeping the slanting cheek-bones.
‘You’ve got a body any twenty year old would die for,’ he said humbly, patting his gut, which Juno’s diet didn’t seem to be having much effect on. He must stop sending Jessica out for Toblerone in the middle of the afternoon.
‘What ‘appen to your marriage?’ asked Alexei.
‘My wife left me.’
‘Silly cow.’
Getting to his feet, Alexei put a hand on the portable barre, raised his leg till his calf brushed his ear, stretching and turning, then he wandered over to the window. Floating down from George’s silver-pillared beech trees was the first pale green foliage. Alexei broke off a twig, caressing the shiny satin leaves.
‘Tender as young flesh,’ he sighed. ‘Tomorrow, perhaps the day after, the leaves darken and harden and coarsen and they will never be that young again. Did you know Prokofiev was lousy ballroom dancer? He write these great ballets, but when he ask pretty young girls to dance with him, they ran away.’
Dropping the twig in his glass of Perrier, stealing a last glance in the mirror, Alexei touched George’s square blushing face with the back of a careless finger.
‘You are good guy, I will dance for you.’
Evgenia was waiting outside, bent over, arms flopping loosely, as graceful as one of George’s willows.
He’s on his way, a rumble of excitement went round the vast crowd, who were really squashed now as more and more people flowed in from Cotchester. Floodlighting added splendour to the towering trees and the battlements of the house.
Dropping his wolf-coat in the wings as if he were shedding the years, Alexei strutted on, nostrils flaring, dark head thrown back to show off the wondrous slav bone-structure, half-smile playing over the jutting lips, thrust-out chest beneath the floating shirt descending to the flattest belly, above long strong white legs, rippling with muscle. Alexei had no need of the older dancer’s disguise of black tights. There was strength and arrogance in every inch of his lithe youthful body.
‘Oh Christ, help me,’ murmured Marcus.
Never had the RSO strings played with such swooning lyricism. Alexei crept behind the pillar, the lurking lover quivering with anticipation.
Justin woken by the applause, however, had other ideas.
‘Dad, Dad, why isn’t that man wearing any trousers?’
There was a horrified pause.
‘That man’s got no trousers on, Dad.’
‘Expect he’s been playing in the pit,’ said the Labour councillor’s husband with a guffaw.
‘Shut up!’ hissed an anguished Marcus.
‘Dad, Dad, why’s that man got a big willy?’
‘It’s called a codpiece, Justin,’ said Gilbert, who believed in reason.