‘Pink, pink, pink, pink,’ cried an agitated blackbird, unnerved by the proximity of Scriabin and Sibelius who were chasing each other and big moths through the soft blue dusk.
‘With any luck, it’ll rain,’ said Flora.
‘Even if it chucks it down it won’t shrink Hermione’s monstrous ego,’ stormed Abby.
The
coup de grâce
for Abby was when Hermione announced a week before the concert, that she would need an extra ticket for her agent, Christopher Shepherd, who would be jetting in from New York.
Abby downed sticks and refused to conduct.
‘That man screwed my career,’ she screamed at George.
‘Not from what Marcus was telling me, he says you’re back playing chumpion.’
‘I don’t care, right? I am not conducting in front of Christopher.’
‘Best revenge – to show him how good you’ve got.’
But Abby was adamant. At such short notice she expected George would bring in the Fat Controller or one of the RSO regular guest conductors. But to her horror and Hermione’s delight, within an hour, Rannaldini, who was after all a local boy living in nearby Paradise, had found a rare window in his diary and agreed to take over.
Flora went ballistic. The whole thing was a set-up, a plot to infiltrate Rannaldini into the RSO. George had invited Christopher over deliberately, knowing Abby would back down.
‘I’m not going to be conducted by Rannaldini either,’ she told Viking, ‘I’m going off sick.’
The rehearsals for ‘Dim Hermione’s creating,’ as it became known, were incredibly acrimonious. The lecherous tenor, Alphonso, last seen adding a profane note to
The Messiah
when he swapped Louis Vuitton cases with Flora, was back, singing the archangel Uriel and jumping on everyone. He had got so much fatter that Miles, who met him at the station, couldn’t change gear and when they arrived at the cathedral, and George leapt forward to open the door, Alphonso tumbled out. Later when he fell over lurching forward to pinch Nellie’s bottom, he couldn’t get up but lay like a turtle and George had to rustle up the entire chorus to right him.
Adam and Raphael were both played by Walter, a charming bearlike bearded German, who detested Hermione.
‘Last time, I sing vith her and take a bow, she step in front and kick me in the shin,’ he told Flora.
Walter was very taken by Marcus, who accompanied him in a piano rehearsal. The boy, he said, was a natural accompanist and should take it up as a career as there was such a shortage of good ones. And why was Marcus so unhappy? When Flora mumbled about Marcus wanting to marry a beautiful girl and worrying about not being able to support her, Walter gave her an old-fashioned look.
‘You are sad too, my child.’
Flora confessed she couldn’t face Rannaldini and the moment his big black helicopter blotted out the sun, when he flew in to take a full choral rehearsal on the afternoon of the performance, she pushed off, claiming she’d got the flu. Abby, traumatized at the thought of Christopher’s arrival, had dragged Marcus off to Paris for the weekend. Flora would have joined them if she hadn’t promised to cat and dog sit.
In his pretty house in the Close, Julian had also seen the helicopter land. Knowing that Rannaldini would spend at least ten minutes primping in his dressing-room, he picked up the score of
The Creation
. He loved the joyful tunes, the celebration of nature, the exuberant orchestration full of ravishing woodwind solos, which enhanced but never overwhelmed the singing. Every day during its composition, Haydn had knelt down and prayed to God to ‘strengthen me for my work’. God had answered his prayers.
The last time Rannaldini and Julian had met, Julian had been sitting in the leader’s chair in drag. Aware that his job, and the house in which he and his family had been so blissfully happy, might at any moment be taken away from him, Julian fell to his knees, praying that he might keep his cool and have the courage to protect his orchestra.
Out of the window as he rose to his feet, he could see the RSO warming up, nervous yet thrilled at the prospect of playing under such a great conductor. The stage had been set up on the yellow, drought-dried water meadows in the shadow of the cathedral and sheltered by two huge limes, whose gold leaves trailed on the ground as if they were already in long dresses for tonight’s performance.
Twenty minutes later, the wilting musicians, still waiting for Rannaldini, were running through the recitative in which God created the animal kingdom.
Loudly and briskly Julian led his First Violins up the scale, followed by a fortissimo bellow from the bassoons and trombones. ‘
With cheerful roaring, there stands the Lion
,’ sang a smiling Walter.
The strings then scampered up another scale, followed by loud staccato pounces.
‘
The Tiger comes bouncing in leaps from his lair
,’ sang Walter.
Exactly on cue, more feline and explosively unpredictable than any tiger, Rannaldini bounded on to the rostrum. He looked magnificent, lean, fit and dark brown, as though he’d spent a month in linseed oil rather than Sardinia. Both his tan and his swept-back thick pewter-grey hair were enhanced by a polo shirt, the clear scarlet of a runner-bean flower, which was tucked into pale grey trousers. Despite his outward sophistication, all the primaeval darkness that had once covered the earth seemed concentrated in his malevolent black eyes. But as they swept disdainfully over choir and orchestra, every woman except Militant Moll, was glad she’d spent all morning, frantically pulling on different clothes, scenting, bathing, shaving legs, washing hair and putting on waterproof mascara, because Rannaldini always made women cry.
Rannaldini didn’t miss a beat when he saw Julian.
‘They told me you had come here, Mr Pellafacini,’ he said softly.
Seeing their revered leader white and shaking, fear ran through the RSO. Cyril put away his bulb catalogue, Davie Buckle his pack of cards.
Rannaldini knew every note of the score and demanded fanatical precision. His personality was so strong that musicians responded to the slightest move of a suntanned finger, the lift of a thick ebony eyebrow. A flared nostril had been known to bring entire flute sections out in a rash.
Not by a flicker of a muscle, did he now show how jolted he was by how much the RSO had improved. When it came to attack, emotion and beauty of tone they were streets ahead of the CCO.
So, as was his wont, Rannaldini tore them apart, instantly identifying the weakest musicians, ordering them to play on their own, making his beat so small, and his instructions so piano, that it was also impossible at the back to interpret them.
‘Could you possibly beat a little more distinctly, Maestro, and speak up a little,’ quavered Old Henry.
‘I speak quietly,’ hissed Rannaldini, ‘so you will concentrate more. Get a hearing-aid, old man, eef you can’t interpret my beat, how will you ever read that telegram from the Queen when eet arrives.’
Seeing Militant Moll’s pursed lips, he rounded on her.
‘And you can stop faking,’ he screamed. ‘You’re not lying underneath your weemp of a boyfriend now.’
The orchestra gave a nervous guffaw.
‘Say something, Nin,’ hissed Moll.
Ninion gazed fixedly at his oboe.
Rannaldini’s cruellest jibes were reserved for Old Cyril, who had got plastered at lunch-time. In one aria, in which God created the flowers and fruits, the horns had beautiful drifting bars of triplets.
Realizing Cyril’s trembling lip couldn’t produce a pure note, Rannaldini made him play over and over again on his own, finally suggesting Cyril replaced his French horn part with his P45. Cyril burst into tears. Mortified, the orchestra gazed at the floor. Julian clenched his fists, willing himself to speak out.
Viking was already in a bad temper. He hated the chorus resting their scores on his head, and ramming their big knees into his back. Seeing him lean over and pat Cyril’s heaving shoulders, Rannaldini realized there was a member of the orchestra still to torture.
‘Seven bars after ten, on your own, First Horn.’
Flawlessly the notes floated round the water meadows.
‘Again,’ yelled Rannaldini, ‘I want no hint of brassiness. You are not weeth the Black Dykes Band now.’
Viking played it again: perfectly.
‘You no understand.’ Rannaldini jumped down from the rostrum and picked up Julian’s fiddle. ‘Theese is how I want it.’ And he proceeded to play the phrase beautifully but with a slightly different emphasis.
Viking put down his horn and, strolling towards the rostrum, picked up Mary’s violin and repeated the phrase even more beautifully.
‘Now you play it on the horn, Maestro,’ he said insolently.
The orchestra grinned.
Rannaldini lost his temper.
‘Your section sound like donkey gelded with sceesors,’ he screamed.
On cue the sun had crept round the cathedral spire, gilding Viking’s blond mane.
‘With cheerful roaring, there stands the lion,’ muttered Clare to Candy. ‘Oh, go on, Viking.’
‘Are you speaking to me?’ drawled Viking.
‘What does eet look like?’ Tigerish, Rannaldini was poised to lash out.
‘Eeet looks awfully rude. Please don’t slag off my section like that, we are quite prepared to do anything you want, but only if you ask us nicely. Secondly the orchestra have now played for an hour and a half, I suggest you thank them and give them a break. Finally Cyril used to play in a horn section that was known as God’s Own Quartet. Frankly, you’re not fit to lick his boots.’
With Rannaldini’s screams ringing in his ears, Viking strolled off to Close Encounters which by special licence was open all day.
On his return, Rannaldini was still yelling in his dressing-room.
‘How dare you insult Maestro Rannaldini,’ spluttered Miles. ‘He says he never been spoken to like that in his life.’
‘What a good thing I was here to teach the little shit some manners.’
‘I didn’t know you played the violin,’ said Knickers reproachfully thinking of the times he had been short of a fiddler.
‘Indeed I do, Knickers, I’m Irish.’
By this time Hermione had arrived and was savaging her poor dresser. She had just been the subject of
This is Your Life
(who’d had an awful time finding people to be nice about her) and was also
Artist of the Week
on Radio Three, so you couldn’t escape the old bat, particularly if you were George. He had been excited and wildly flattered when Dame Hermione had asked if she could deal with him directly. He had never dreamt it would involve endless reversed-charged calls at four o’clock in the morning.
‘I’ve just remembered something else you can put in the programme about me, George. I’ve sung Susannah forty-eight times not forty-seven.’
And George had had to go back to the printers again because after ‘God Save the Queer’, he didn’t trust Jessica.
But Hermione still had numerous admirers. All the occupants of the Close had their binoculars trained on her heaving bosom as they pretended to do
The Times
crossword.
A besotted Gilbert had even shipped Gwynneth off to a crumhorn workshop in Bath for the afternoon and rolled up with her Red Riding Hood basket filled with aubergine rissoles and a bottle of parsnip wine. Hermione accepted a glass graciously, but unfortunately Gilbert had been pre-emptied. Always on the prowl for likely lads, Hermione had taken a shine to Viking. The shine was not reciprocated. For a start, Viking didn’t like her dismissive remarks about Abby.
‘Look how happy these musicians are to be playing once more under a great conductor,’ Hermione told him, as the entire RSO, who’d all felt the need for several strong drinks, filed grinning back from Close Encounters after the break.
Hermione then started bitching about her fellow soloists.
‘I don’t know why I’m working with such people.’
‘To make money, presumably,’ said Viking, emptying the last of Gilbert’s parsnip wine into her glass.
Seeing his mistress coffee-housing with Viking as he returned to the rostrum, the ‘great conductor’ decided not to appreciate her next aria.
‘Why you make a pausa on Top E.’
‘I always make a pausa there, Rannaldini.’
‘Eef Haydn had wanted a pausa, he would have written. He didn’t write, so we do not make.’
The screaming match that ensued shocked even moony Gilbert.
‘You seeng like a strangulated parrot.’
‘I won’t sing at all if you speak to me like that,’ squawked Hermione, certainly sounding like one, and stormed off the set.
‘Menopausa,’ grinned Viking and, as Rannaldini was yelling at the cellos, carried on an argument he and Blue were having about who had bonked the oldest women.
‘I’ve had lots in their seventies,’ said Viking airly. ‘And their daughters at the same time.’
‘Bet you can’t bonk Dim Hermione on her birthday.’