Appassionata

Flora wished Viking were on the coach. She’d been so upset by Rannaldini’s poaching of the RSO repertoire. Then she’d read the inscription on Viking’s cardboard tombstone. Not able to bear being hurt again, she had refused all Viking’s invitations but she still caught him smiling at her appraisingly, which always made her heart beat faster.

The snow was blanking out signposts and roadsigns. The coach drivers were all for turning back; Knickers, in a serious twist, was more terrified of George’s wrath if they didn’t arrive, and urged them on. Twenty miles from Cotchester, the snow started drifting, and they ran into blizzards. Trees reared up out of the diminishing visibility like ghosts. Climbing to the top of a hill the coach skidded into the verge and ground to a halt. Wheels whirred impotently, raising fountains of snow.

‘What do we do now?’ asked Knickers. As he put his long nose outside, his spectacles filled up with white flakes. The wind was blowing straight from Siberia.

‘You all get out and push,’ said Abby, who’d been in a car just behind them. ‘I’m not going to be beaten by that bastard Hugo.’

‘How beautiful are the feet with chilblains,’ sang Flora, wincing as she landed on iron runnels of frozen mud. As she righted herself, she was amazed to feel a coat round her shoulders, and even grateful to be offered a pair of awful driving gloves.

‘Can’t have you catching cold,’ said Carmine and, as swearing and panting they all pushed the coach, she felt his hand over hers.

‘I may be gone some time,’ said Randy, sliding off to have a pee.

Two hours and eight miles later, the coach descended into Cotchester to find completely clear roads, starry skies, and the great cathedral floodlit.

‘They’d never have believed us if we hadn’t got through,’ said Abby who’d abandoned her car.

Her orchestra, in various states of hypothermia and mutiny, gazed at her stonily. They hadn’t even the heart to boo as they passed a window in the High Street, entirely devoted to Dame Edith and the CCO’s latest recording of the Christmas Oratorio, or at huge posters everywhere advertising ‘Dame Hermione Sings Messiah’, in huge letters, with the other soloists and the RSO in tiny print underneath. Inside the packed cathedral, lit by hundreds of candles, a huge Christmas tree and television lights, the four soloists, choir, crews and audience were raring to go.

There was no time for a rehearsal. Abby went straight up onto the rostrum to explain what had happened.

‘We came through a white hell, OK? The orchestra are frozen. They’re just having something hot to eat, I hope you’ll bear with us.’

The audience were more than happy to do so, but not Dame Hermione. She was the one who kept people waiting. As the harpsichordist had already arrived from London, Hermione had been about to offer the audience an impromptu concert of her latest album, Soothe the Sad Heart, which with the television coverage would have sold an extra fifty thousand copies over Christmas.

She had upset the other three soloists by her histrionics about catching cold and her demands. Poor Alphonso, the twenty-five-stone Italian tenor, was forced to have blue drops put in his eyes, and his bald patch blacked out by the make-up girls in a howling draught because Dame Hermione had commandeered the entire vestry as a dressing-room.

Fortunately George Hungerford had missed all these hysterics because he had arrived only five minutes before the orchestra, so the first thing he heard was Dame Hermione’s deep voice saying. ‘Take me to the fans.’

The first thing Dame Hermione heard was George telling Miles that he’d have his ‘goots for garters’ if the orchestra didn’t turn up.

Surrounded by twenty blow heaters, Dame Hermione shivered from excitement rather than cold. She adored masterful men.

Meanwhile Steve Smithson charged around with his thermometer, complaining the cathedral was too cold, and that there was no proper band room, since Dame Hermione had hogged all the space.

Fortified by a glass of red wine each, paid for by Abby, and pizzas in the Bar Sinister opposite, the orchestra had perked up enough to engage in the usual argy-bargy with the television crews. There was simply not enough room on the stage to accommodate Fat Isobel and Fat Alphonso and the harpsichord, let alone having cables to trip over, mikes up your nose, lights shining in your eyes, and cameramen bossily shoving chairs and music-stands aside to give them a clear camera angle on Dame Hermione.

A BBC minion, in a fake fur coat and strawberry-pink trousers, who looked as though he ate choirboys for breakfast, sidled up to handsome Randy as he blew a few testing blasts on his trumpet.

‘Hi, Clark Gable, you playing the big solo?’

‘No, him,’ Randy jerked his sleek sandy head in Carmine’s direction.

‘Shame, you’re so much more — ‘the BBC minion ran his eyes over Randy’s body — ‘photogenic, particularly when you smile.’

‘Carmine wouldn’t like it very much.’

‘We’ll have to use green face powder to take his colour down. What are you doing after the show?’

‘Your admirer’s got an admirer,’ giggled Clare.

‘Yes, I’ve lucked out there,’ sighed Candy, tightening her G-string.

‘There’s absolutely no way I’m swapping seats with Moll — ‘Flora was now telling the BBC minion — ‘even to appear on television. Moll would kill me.’

On cue, Moll rushed up in a state of chunter.

‘There are no ladies’ toilets, so I had to squat in the gents, and someone’s written: “RSO stands for Really Shitty Orchestra” on the wall. It’s not funny, Flora. You’re to cross it out in the interval,’ she shouted to a cringing Ninion.

On came Julian, smiling broadly, fiddle aloft to relieved applause, and some barracking from the gallery.

‘Take off those dark glasses, deary,’ urged the BBC minion. ‘Looks a bit camp.’ Then, as Julian lowered them a fraction showing his red-albino eyes, said, ‘well, perhaps not.’

‘Jesus, it’s cold,’ said Bill Thackery looking at the hundreds of candles flickering in the draught.

A rustle of excitement and some cheering greeted Abby and the soloists. Dame Hermione, diamonds sparkling in the camera lights, was clad from top to toe in Rannaldini’s sleek, dark Christmas mink.

‘Ring up Animal Rights at once,’ snarled Flora.

Hermione had no competition from the contralto who looked and sang like a sheep and was eight months’ pregnant.

Having bowed to the audience, Abby thanked them once more for being so patient.

‘And I just wanna tell you guys,’ she hissed at the orchestra, ‘that the entire CCO including Hugo, are up in the gallery, waiting to boo, so flaming well play out of your boots, and don’t let the soloists drag.’

This had the desired effect. The RSO played with that brilliance and attack often engendered by rage and irritation, and, even without a rehearsal, the Cotchester Choir were infinitely superior to Peggy Parker’s screeching seagulls. Despite the icy cold of the cathedral, the sopranos led by Dame Edith’s helpmate, Monica Baddingham, had absolutely no difficulty in hitting Top A as they romped through the ‘Glory of the Lord’.

Not wanting to bump into any of his father’s friends, Marcus crept into the concert after the overture. Returning to Cotchester, which was only a few miles from his home in Penscombe, made him feel desperately homesick.

The great cathedral was as filled with memories as shadows. His father had always read the lesson at Midnight Mass, and despite being divorced had managed to have his second marriage to Taggie there, much to the rage of the bishop. It had snowed that day too, and Marcus remembered his desolation as a young boy as his father and his ravishing new stepmother took off by helicopter into the blizzard.

Alphonso, the hugely fat tenor, seemed to be singing. ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye,’ directly to him.

Marcus also noticed, because of a shortage of basses, George Hungerford had joined the choir and could be heard belting out, ‘Oonto Oos a Boy is Born’ in true Hoodersfield fashion. Marcus thought how attractive George was, so aggressively macho, compared to the bobbing Adam’s apples and waggling beards around him.