evening dresses in plastic cases and holdalls which littered the front-stall seats and the gangway. No-one even minded that a cleaner was hoovering the red carpet up in the dress circle.
Hands floating above the music like a seagull, tall and gangling with a shock of blond hair, Oswaldo swayed on the rostrum, his ginger T-shirt showing two inches of bony white back each time he raised his arms.
‘This is dancing music,’ he said, calling a halt in the second movement. ‘It should be a little yar.’
Short of English, he pushed his elbows upwards, swaying his narrow hips to illustrate an imaginary beat.
‘Christ, I’ve got a hangover,’ said the leader of the orchestra, calling out to a passing Bob Harefield, ‘Get us an Alka-Seltzer, there’s a love, and let’s have a black-coffee break at the end of this movement, Ossie.’
But suddenly the musicians at the front desks started to shake, without knowing why. Then, gradually, as a faint sweet-musky scent reached the nostrils of the entire orchestra, they realized it was Rannaldini’s horribly distinctive aftershave, Maestro, specially created for him by Givenchy, wafting over them, as he strolled towards the rostrum.
‘A little yar,’ he murmured silkily. ‘What a very specific instruction. Not very OK ya in this case.’
The leader of the orchestra dropped his bow, the percussionist choked on his toffee, a bassoonist hastily put down P.D. James, the harpist stopped painting her toenails, a beautiful violinist in a purple shirt, deliberately placed at the desk nearest the audience, stopped reading a letter from her boyfriend. A female horn player, who’d been infatuated with Rannaldini since he’d bedded her on the orchestra’s last trip to Japan, dived behind the cellist in front, frantically combing her hair, and applying blusher to her blanched cheeks. A paper dart intended for Oswaldo fell at Rannaldini’s feet. Oswaldo melted away like snow in the morning sun. Bob Harefield on his way into the hall with a fizzing glass of Alka-Seltzer went sharply into reverse.
Normally chatter swelled whenever there was a halt, but now the hall was totally silent. Musicians, still trickling in because they hadn’t expected Rannaldini, were greeted with a sabatier tongue which slashed through their excuses.
‘Another pile-up on the motorway? The traffic was terrible from the airport?’ bawled Rannaldini to a little flautist weighed down by Sainsbury carrier bags. ‘The road was perfectly clear ten minutes ago.
‘A train taken off?
‘I’m sorry, Rannaldini, there was a bomb-scare in Sloane Square,’ said a front-desk violinist scuttling in.
‘Bomb-scare,’ purred Rannaldini, as the man frantically tuned his violin, twiddling and twisting the nobs with a shaking hand. Then with a roar, ‘I’ll put a bomb under you, all of you! Just look under your cars before you leave.’
Slowly he mounted the rostrum. As gleamingly brown from the LA sun as any of the cellos in his string section, he kept on his black overcoat with the astrakhan collar because he hadn’t adjusted to the cold March weather. Letting the score drop to the floor in a gesture of contempt, he removed his Rolex and laid it on the music-stand, then stood as still as one of his own Valhalla statues, establishing dominance.
The orchestra edged nearer their music-stands, wishing they could have fastened seat-belts against turbulence. Suddenly the music they’d known backwards five minutes ago seemed terrifyingly unfamiliar.
Tapping the baton given him by Toscanini, Rannaldini held out his arms. The leader put his violin under his chin, bow quaking in his hand, as Rannaldini gave the upbeat for the start of the funereally slow third movement.
Eyes missing nothing, gesticulating exquisitely with his beautiful hands, the right one keeping time, the left exhorting his musicians on, he let them have their heads. Economical with his movements, even his stick hand twitching no more than the tail of a cat watching a bird through a window, Rannaldini lulled them into a false sense of security. Perhaps the audience in Vienna had been right, after all.
Then he unleashed his fury, like a Fascist police squad moving in on a defenceless mob with cudgels, finding fault after fault with the performance until the women were in tears, the men grey and shaking, and shredded India rubber covered the floor where they’d erased Oswaldo’s instructions on their scores and replaced them with Rannaldini’s.
Able to identify a wrong note ten miles away, he singled out an oboe player. ‘You make a hundred meestakes.’
‘It’s difficult that bit,’ stammered the player.
‘Rubbish,’ thundered Rannaldini.
Strolling down from the rostrum he picked up the oboe and played it perfectly.
‘You haven’t practised. You’re fired.’ He handed back the oboe.
Then he noticed Bob Harefield’s charming Humpty Dumpty face with its tired bruised eyes, and shouted that he would not conduct on Sunday unless the twenty-four musicians Bob had hired in his absence were fired as well.
‘I no Okkay them,’ he screamed.
‘But every seat is sold, Maestro, and what about the BBC and Catchitune?’ said the manager of the Mozart Hall, almost in tears.
‘It weel ’ave to be cancelled,’ snarled Rannaldini. ‘I weel not play with peegs.’ Howling, he turned on his orchestra and would have kicked over a few music-stands if his handmade black shoes hadn’t been new.
‘I ’ear you murder Beethoven
‘We got very good reviews for both,’ protested Bob, putting a comforting arm round the shoulder of the sacked oboist.
‘Reviewers are stupid peegs, and I want heem sacked,’ Rannaldini pointed at the front-desk violinist who’d rushed in late.
‘We can’t sack him,’ whispered Bob. ‘His wife’s just left him.’
‘Sensible woman,’ said Rannaldini, then, his voice rising to a shriek, ‘I want heem fired.’
A diversion was caused by the cleaner who started hoovering again at the back of the stalls.
‘Another sensible woman,’ said Rannaldini, ‘trying to obliterate this cacophony.’
A further diversion was caused by the arrival of Hermione swathed in mink to sing in the fourth movement.
‘I refuse to put those poor furriers out of business,’ she was saying to her entourage of agent, secretary, make-up girl, seamstress and lighting specialist. ‘I, for one, believe people come before animals.’
Having kissed her on both cheeks, Rannaldini calmed down a little.
‘We will move on to the last movement, since Mrs Harefield has done you the honour of turning up and, unlike you, knows the score.’
Hermione was a nightmare to work with. Beneath the facade of gushing serenity, she was ruthlessly egotistical, always making a fuss about dressing rooms and acoustics, taking against members of the orchestra, or other soloists, creating fearful anxiety as to whether she would go on at all, leaving everyone drained because she’d milked them of so many compliments. Then, once she opened her mouth, her performance would be flawless.
Today as she flapped around, fussing about being properly lit, her husband Bob went quietly round the orchestra smoothing feathers. Holding the score, eating an apple to moisten her throat, Hermione listened unmoved while Rannaldini bawled out a beautiful little blond female flautist who, out of terror, had fluffed the introductory bars before Hermione’s entrance.
Waiting for the nod to bring her in, Hermione stood on Rannaldini’s left, as she had so often in the past while he was making her famous in every capital in the world. It still gave Rannaldini a charge. Hermione couldn’t act for the percussionist’s toffee. She always sacrificed acting for beauty of tone. She irritated the hell out of Rannaldini, but when she opened her mouth and that ripple of angelic sound soared full and clear above the orchestra, he could forgive her anything. In return she seemed to be making love to him with her huge brown eyes, grateful to him for conjuring up magic she was unaware she possessed.
The orchestra watched her wonderful bosom rising and falling with a mixture of lust and dislike, but at the end they gave her a round of applause and even the odd bravo because she expected it.
‘Excellent, Mrs Harefield.’ Rannaldini’s flat bitchy voice could sink to reverberatingly seductive depths when he was in a conciliatory mood.
‘But as for you lot, go ’ome and practise. This is the score.’ Picking it off the floor, he hurled it into the
