Appassionata

ingenuity of Abby’s would-be seducers even further.

‘Our fright will last two hours,’ said Noriko consulting the schedule as they queued to check in.

Totally ignoring Miles’s twenty-kilo limit, Clare rocked up with four suitcases and three tennis rackets weighing one hundred and twenty kilos, confidently expecting brawny Dixie to hump it all around for her. Being her first tour, she hadn’t appreciated that musicians never carry anyone else’s stuff, or that Dixie would be far too busy competing with the other men to carry Abby’s six suitcases of scores (Beethoven’s Ninth was larger than the Chinese telephone book) and clothes for each concert, plus a second change for dinner with the ambassador later.

‘Did you pack your suitcase yourself?’ the check-in girl asked Randy.

‘Of course.’

‘He did not,’ said Candy indignantly.

Militant Moll went puce in the face when a customs man insisted she carried her vibrator in her hand luggage.

‘What’s wrong with Ninion?’ chorused the Celtic Mafia.

Miss Parrott scuttled through the passport check; she didn’t want Dimitri or anyone else to discover her real age.

Abby was touched when every man in the orchestra converged to lift her hand luggage into the lockers and sit next to her on the flight.

Francis bought her a copy of the Independent, Old Henry, some glacier mints. Randy, who was intending to spend the two thousand on a new set of golf clubs, to Clare’s irritation, upstaged everyone by buying Abby some Amarige body lotion in duty free, and murmuring that he hoped he might have the privilege to rub it in during the next week.

Poor Cathie Jones, always airsick, and green before take-off, was cringing at the back of the plane. Putting as much distance between her and himself as possible, Carmine shot up the front to ask Abby’s view on his solo in the trumpet fanfare in Rachel’s Requiem. Watching him, Blue slid in beside Cathie with a bag of barley sugars.

‘Talk to me, and you won’t have time to throw op.’

Hilary and Juno were infuriated. Having bought Hello! and Tatler they found endless pictures of Clare and her father on 12 August.

‘I’ve always made shooting lunches for Daddy,’ explained Clare apologetically. ‘If I’d objected he’d have shot me as well.’

‘Isn’t that Dixie peering out of the bracken?’ hissed Juno.

‘No, it’s a herd of Daddy’s Highland cattle,’ said Clare airily, in all senses of the word, because they’d taken off.

Even before the first drinks trolley started rumbling down the aisle, Miles was on his feet.

‘This is an important tour. Please remember you are an English,’ (loud boos) ‘I mean British,’ (more boos) ‘orchestra and behave like ambassadors for your country and exercise decorum on all occasions.’

Exactly on cue, Randy and Candy emerged from the lavatory, straightening their clothes and Miles’s exhortation that they must rout out hooliganism was drowned in howls and catcalls.

‘An important tour,’ ploughed on Miles.

‘Particularly as we’re going to witness the return of L’Appassionata as a soloist,’ quavered Old Henry, who wanted the two thousand for a new bow, to loud cheers all round.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ wondered Flora, as different players queued up to ask Abby if, after the concert, she’d like a personally guided tour of the lovely old city of Seville, which, after all, had been the setting for Don Giovanni’s ill-fated scrap with the Commandatore.

Meanwhile, beside Julian, Mary, eight months pregnant, was embroidering a sampler for the new baby.

‘D’you think she’s going to explode?’ whispered Cherub nervously to Noriko.

‘I have just seen a pig fly past the window,’ Viking muttered to Blue, as they waited for their luggage in Seville. ‘Carmine has just forked out a hundred pesetas for a trolley for Abby’s cases. This is going to be a fight to the death.’

The Seville sky was the palest blue, as though it had been through the washing-machine a thousand times. As they chugged past ancient tawny houses, and streets lined with glossy green trees, Viking leant out of the bus and picked an orange. It was much hotter than Rutminster. This time everyone was housed in the same hotel. Before the rehearsal, Abby had a quick swim in the hotel pool. Every man in the RSO seemed to have the same idea, showing off with high dives and flashy crawls.

Old Henry, dreaming of his new bow, dog-paddled eagerly around Abby. Carmine kept vanishing under the water, only deterred from groping her by Viking, who wouldn’t have dreamt of crinkling his hair by swimming before a concert, but who prowled round the edge of the pool keeping an eye on his quarry.

At six o’clock there was a panic instead of a rehearsal, because the cherry-red RSO van hadn’t arrived with the instruments and all the music. The real heroes of the tour, Charlton Handsome and his humpers and roadies, had been driving from Rutminster since Saturday morning. They had been held up at the border, where Customs, assuming they were a rock band, upended the entire van for drugs.

As the van finally drew up outside the Seville concert hall, frenzied musicians fell on it, terrified their precious instruments might have gone astray. Charlton was rolling the big bass drum down the ramp, when he was pushed aside by Dimitri, frantic to find his Guarnieri, vowing they’d never be parted again.

‘Just fuck off, Knickers,’ Charlton was now saying to an hysterical Nicholas, ‘or I’ll drive the ‘ole lot into the river.

‘Fanks, love,’ he added to Flora, who’d brought out a six-pack of iced beer.

‘I will not have drinking during working hours,’ spluttered Miles, rolling up in a dinner-jacket.

‘I’ll ’ave you remember, Mister Brian-Knowles,’ snapped back Charlton, ‘that while you was shacked up all cosy last night wiv Lady ‘Ilary, me and the boys,’ he pointed to an ice pick and shovel attached to the inside of the lorry, ‘was digging our way outa the Pyrenees.’

Miles went purple, particularly when Flora burst out laughing.

‘What’s in that box?’ she asked, as Charlton relieved her of another can of beer.

‘Viola players — you get more in if you slice them thinly.’

The concert was a massive success. John Lill, the soloist, played the Rachmaninov so beautifully he had the very formal, straight-backed audience yelling their dark sleek heads off.

Abby was nervous how they’d react to Rachel’s Requiem, but they listened enraptured, and when Viking launched into ‘Rachel’s Lament’, they all started to clap as though he were Pavarotti singing ‘Nessun Dorma’, so Viking played it again, and the applause at the end went on for ten minutes.

As the roadies loaded up again for the drive to Granada, Charlton told Julian he’d heard that ‘triffic tune’ twice on the bar radio during the concert. Francis the Good Loser, climbing up a lamp-post in the main square to get a better reception on the World Service, nearly got arrested later in the evening.

‘Listen,’ he thrust out his radio.

‘Ah, “Rachel’s Lament”, very good tune,’ chorused the ring of policemen, giving him a round of applause when he played it on his fiddle.

As Abby came into the hotel around one o’clock after an official dinner with John Lill and the Mayor of Seville, the foyer was suddenly full of male musicians. Jerry and Quinton both wanted words about their solos in Beethoven’s Ninth, and individually wondered if they could run through them in Abby’s suite.

‘No, you fucking can’t,’ Viking was at Abby’s elbow, waving her key. ‘You pinched that solo from Cyril, Quinton, you bloody sort it out.’

‘What about a drink?’ he murmured to Abby, two minutes later as he opened her door.

Abby havered, then said wistfully, ‘I ought to get an early night, and I’ve gotta practise the Mozart — it’s more difficult than I figured, I’m terrified of letting Rodney down.’

Or yourself, thought Viking.

He wasn’t going to push it. Instead he gave her the orange he’d picked from the bus, and made her promise to have dinner with him later in the week.

On tours, as on away fixtures, the orchestra tended to split into two groups. Pond Life was epitomized by