‘Ay am
such
a fan.’
So Hermione befriended Pushy to infuriate Chloe. Alpheus, Rannaldini, Sexton, Sylvestre and Mikhail had all clocked Pushy. In return, Pushy whispered constantly in all their ears, including Tristan’s, that her greatest role at music college had been Elisabetta and wouldn’t she be younger and prettier in the role than Dame Hermione? One morning she was practising one of Hermione’s arias, and hitting all the high notes perfectly, when Rannaldini’s vulpine smile came round the door.
‘Would you like me to accompany you, my child?’ Then, as he was tinkling away, ‘You see, I am not such an ogre. When I say thees or that ees bad, it is because I have ears to ’ear the wrong things.’
The chorus were not booked for the following day, but Rannaldini confided to Pushy that he would specially like to send a limo for her tomorrow afternoon so she could hear the orchestra recording the overture that he himself had composed, and then perhaps they could have tea at the Ritz. Pushy was in heaven.
But if Rannaldini was histrionic when he conducted Verdi he was ten times more difficult when it came to his own music. Having reduced the orchestra to nervous wrecks in the rehearsal beforehand he started rowing with an increasingly demented Tristan.
‘If you take it that fast,’ yelled Tristan, ‘the hunt will never have time to stream down the valley.’
‘Then they must stream queeker.’
‘Then you will lose magical flowing effect.’
‘I must be faithful to my music.’
‘First time bastard’s been faithful to anything,’ muttered Viking O’Neill, the first horn.
‘I must be faithful to story,’ shouted Tristan.
‘OK, we rehearse two ways: queek then flowing.’
Rannaldini proceeded to take his overture at a breakneck speed, his stick a blur, and then at such a funereal pace that the strings ran out of bow, the woodwind and the brass out of puff, and all got screamed at again.
Tristan nearly killed Rannaldini. So did Serena, when she saw the ringleted, beribboned Pushy Galore at the back of the hall.
‘Rannaldini said no outsiders,’ she stormed.
‘Sir Roberto kaindly sent a limo for me,’ simpered Pushy.
Tristan sat shaking in the control room, his head in his hands.
‘Quiet, please, we now record,’ said Rannaldini imperiously, filling the musicians with such terror they could hardly pick up their instruments. ‘Remember, gentlemen, this is for ever.’
He then took his overture at a totally different, lilting, cantering tempo to which the orchestra had a mad struggle to readjust. At the end there was utter silence. Gazing at their shoes, waiting for the inevitable explosion, his musicians didn’t see the tears in Rannaldini’s eyes.
‘Thank you, gentlemen, that was absolutely beautiful,’ he said quietly. ‘You can have the rest of the afternoon off.’
So he can take me to tea at the Ritz, thought Pushy joyfully.
But ignoring Pushy, abandoning the gaping orchestra, Rannaldini bounded upstairs to the control room where, for once, Serena had lost her cool.
‘You cannot waste an entire session,’ she yelled, as she met him in the doorway. ‘What about the introductions to the other acts?’
But her tirade faltered, as Rannaldini’s hand crept inside her purple jersey.
‘We shall go ’ome to your flat.’
‘But Jessie is there with Nanny Bratislava.’
‘Tell little Jessie she must learn to call me Uncle Roberto.’
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.