Appassionata

Abby was in no mood for jokes. As the concert was to be transmitted on Christmas Eve, it would be a ghastly humiliation if the RSO had to pull out through lack of funding.

They had only been invited to take part in the festival because Dame Edith, impressed by Abby’s debut concert, had nagged the organizers. If they weren’t careful, their bitter rivals, the CCO, locked in mortal combat with the RSO for the same audiences, sponsors and subsidies from the Arts Council, would step into the breach.

As a final straw, that even more famous Dame, Hermione Harefield, whose single of ‘I Know that my Redeemer Liveth’ had sold over a million copies, had been booked as one of the soloists and would ‘Rejoice Greatly’ (which was on the flip side of the single) to see Abby so discomfited.

Abby was determined not to be beaten. As she had just received a large royalty cheque from the reissue of her early records, she blew the lot on a hefty insurance policy with Honesty Insurance in Rutminster High Street on condition that they sponsored Messiah.

Honesty Insurance drove a hard bargain. They wanted their slogan, ‘Honesty is the Best Policy’ on posters all over the cathedral as well as their name on the credits. The BBC refused. The deadlock was only broken when the Bishop of Cotchester, a pompous old fossil on the Venturer Board, agreed to mention the company and the slogan in his interval address.

Abby was livid George wasn’t more impressed by her White Knight gesture when she barged into his office to tell him the good news.

‘Honesty Insurance are a bunch of crooks,’ he said, only giving her half his attention because he was trying to sign his letters around a weaving, purring John Drummond.

‘They’ve given me this,’ Abby waved a cheque under George’s nose.

‘We better bank it at once. Jack Rodway says they’re about to go belly-oop. I hope you don’t lose out on that policy. You’d have done better to sponsor the concert yourself.’

Like most successful property developers, George believed only in using other people’s money. When he took over the RSO he had vowed never to give them a penny. He did, however, have a long-term crush on Dame Hermione. She was thirty-nine like him. He and Ruth, also an avid fan, had enjoyed many of her concerts, and worn out her famous LP of the Verdi Requiem. Hermione, like Ruth, was someone George thought of as a ‘real lady’. He would therefore have been prepared to bankroll Messiah and pay Hermione her vast fee, her first-class air fare and her bill at the Cotchester Hilton. Now, thank God, Abby had saved him the trouble.

To avoid her nagging him about rain pouring through the hall roof, he had swarmed off for a lunch-time meeting with Rutminster District Council.

‘Perhaps one of Mr Hungerford’s builders could put in a cheap tender,’ suggested Miss Priddock.

Abby laughed without humour: ‘There is nothing cheap nor tender about Mr Hungerford.’

After a long and obviously successful lunch, George was back wafting brandy fumes, chewing on a huge cigar, and making a nuisance of himself at the afternoon’s rehearsal.

‘You’ve got to keep Messiah moving,’ he told the orchestra. ‘Particularly in part two when there aren’t many good tunes, before the “Hallelujah Chorus” wakes the audience up, and you’ve got to really belt it out to be heard in a big cathedral.’

Abby lost her temper. ‘Just because you come from Huddersfield, it doesn’t mean you own the work.’

‘Nor do you,’ shouted Carmine, who was anxious to put Abby down and to ingratiate himself with George. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing conducting Messiah when it was your lot who crucified the poor sod in the first place.’

‘That’s out of order, Carmine,’ snapped Julian.

‘It was Handel’s descendants,’ yelled back Abby, ‘who sent six million of our lot to the gas chambers.’

‘Please, everyone,’ Julian broke the horrified silence. ‘George is right — Abby, Luisa and I visited the cathedral last week, it’s huge. I know you all know Messiah backwards, but the audience knows it backwards too, so we can’t afford to make mistakes.’

‘Aint it rarver like takin’ coals to Newcastle,’ said Barry, who was hugging his double bass to keep warm. ‘I fort it was the CCO who’d cornered the baroque market. They’re the ones always winnin’ prizes.’

‘That’s why our reputation’s on the line,’ said George.

Messiah requires a very small orchestra, just strings, bassoons, oboes, two trumpets, timps and a harpsichord. So it was a depleted and resentful bunch who boarded the coach in the bitter cold under a lowering mustard-yellow sky the following afternoon. They had all been refused rises and resented having to trail over to Cotchester for no extra money.

With no Eldred and Peter Plumpton, the bridge four was incomplete. With no Hilary and Lionel gone, Ninion and Militant Moll couldn’t sing madrigals on their own. Without Miss Parrott, Dimitri gloomily shared a back seat with his cello.

All the pretty girls, nervous of appearing on television, drooped because there was no Celtic Mafia, except Randy, who was now an item with Candy, to jolly things along. The only cheerful note was Flora running on at the last moment, clean hair flopping, handing out tabloids like an air hostess. All the orchestra, except Hilary, who pretended to despise gossip, were obsessed with the collapse of the Prince of Wales’s marriage and had divided themselves into pro-Charles and pro-Diana factions.

Now they fell on the latest update in ecstasy.

‘I fancy the Brigadier, such piercing blue eyes,’ sighed Nellie. ‘And that’s a lovely new hold-all, Flora,’ she added, glancing up from the Daily Express for a second, ‘Louis Vuitton, isn’t it?’

‘Clever you,’ Flora stroked the dark green leather proudly. ‘Abby was so ashamed of me turning up at gigs weighed down by carrier bags of knickers that she gave it me as an early Christmas present. I can hang my black dresses up in it, and there’s room for Foxie, sponge bags, books and things.’

‘Here, let me.’ To everyone’s amazement, Carmine leapt to his feet and put the hold-all and Flora’s viola case up on the rack.

‘Come and sit here,’ he ushered her into the window-seat beside him.

‘Gosh thanks,’ stammered Flora. ‘Have a Kit-Kat.’ Then because Carmine had to play ‘The Trumpet Shall Sound’ towards the end of the evening, asked ‘Aren’t you terrified about your solo?’

Carmine shrugged.

‘Just because it’s TV I’m bound to crack a note in an embarrassing close-up, but this is a doddle compared with the solo in the B minor Mass. At the end of that, you really see stars.’ And he went on to be fascinating about trumpet music.

Carmine, in fact, was not in a good mood. He had given Cathie hell, because he actually was nervous about the solo, and because Alan Cardew, the planning officer, suddenly appeared to have won the pools, and had just whipped his wife Lindy off to the Seychelles for three weeks; then they were off again, skiing over Christmas.

Denied his mistress and uninhibited today by the endless mockery of the Celtic Mafia, Carmine decided to have a crack at Flora. He’d always fancied the snooty, upmarket little bitch.

Once the tabloids were exhausted, everyone started grumbling about foul letters from their bank manager. Barry the Bass had had to pawn his rings and medallions to get his telephone reconnected. Mary, darning socks, was fretting about paying for Christmas presents. Noriko had sold her little car and nearly died of cold walking to the coach. Old Henry couldn’t afford to get his stereo mended — life without music in a tiny bedsit was very bleak.

‘After the premiere of Messiah, Handel gave all the profits to the poor, which meant one hundred and fortytwo people were released from the debtors prison,’ announced Simon Painshaw.

‘Can’t see Sonny Parker doing that for us,’ sighed Candy.

‘And the hall was so packed,’ went on Simon, ‘that men were asked to leave off their swords and the ladies their hoops.’

‘Oh look,’ said Flora, ‘it’s started to snow.’

At first it didn’t settle on the roads, only laying clean sheets over the fields and crawling like a white leopard along the branches of the trees. But gradually, as the light faded, sky and snow merged, becoming the same stinging sapphire, only divided by evergreens, black trunks, branches and hedgerows that became walls as they crossed over into Gloucestershire. The coach started crackling over frozen puddles and sliding all over the place in the steep narrow lanes.