Appassionata

breakfast outside. Cafe au lait, bacon and mushrooms picked at dawn from the orchard, home-made croissants and apricot jam were all served on and in rose-patterned gold-leaf plates, cups and saucers, part of a priceless set of twelve.

Rodney, who was whipping through The Times crossword, which was faxed out to him from Rutminster every morning, always had his orange juice out of a heavy glass tumbler, of which he was inordinately proud. Engraved with his name and a picture of a puffing train, it had been presented to him by his orchestra on his seventy-fifth birthday last year.

Gisela, despite being old and rheumaticky, hated to be helped. But Abby was desperate to prove her grip was getting stronger, so the moment breakfast was over, she stacked everything including Rodney’s tumbler onto the tray.

‘I’ll carry it.’ In alarm Rodney put down The Times.

‘I’m OK.’

The next moment, Abby’s hand had slipped and everything had smashed into a hundred pieces on the flagstones.

‘Why the hell don’t you leave things alone?’ shouted Rodney.

Too horrified to apologize, Abby stormed upstairs leaving the mess. Within seconds the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ was blaring out of her bedroom. And when Rodney stumped angrily upstairs to play with his trains, Abby had ostentatiously banged her windows shut to blot out the sound of shouting, whistling and hooting. Even when Shostakovich appeared mewing at the window Abby screamed at him to go away. He had a maddening habit of sitting on scores, or leaping onto her shoulders like a witch’s cat when she was giving her all to some elaborate aria.

At one o’clock, she was playing ‘Worthy is the Lamb’ so loudly that she didn’t hear Gisela’s tentative knock, so Gisela let herself in. Always trying to tempt Abby to eat more, she had made her a pale pink smoked salmon souffle, wild strawberry ice-cream, and had squeezed her a glass of her favourite pink-grapefruit juice. Also on the tray, which she placed on the table by the window, was a bowl of vitamins and a posy of mauve autumn crocuses.

Abby went beserk.

‘For Chrissake, how many times do I have to tell you, I’ll come down when I want to eat.’

Gisela’s kind, rosy face crumpled in dismay.

Upstairs the 8.10 from Zurich ran into the 10.55 from Geneva with a crash, as Rodney toddled downstairs. His station-master’s cap, askew over his eye, did nothing to diminish the roaring rage on his face.

‘How dare you shout at Gisela like that, you spoilt brat! Everyone is falling over themselves to be nice to you. Gisela and I are going into Lucerne this afternoon and if you’re not in a better mood when we get home, you can pack your bags and get out.’

Again, Abby was too distraught to apologize. But after they had gone she sobbed her hopelessly muddled heart out. How could she have been so ungrateful? God would punish her by never allowing her to play the violin again.

‘Oh please, what gets into me?’

Wearily she picked up her stick and the battered yellow score of The Messiah. It was cheating to conduct to a record, and made her lazy and slow to adjust. Rodney’s musicians, if he hadn’t already told them not to turn up for such an ungrateful cow, would probably play it in a completely different way. She’d have to sing and imagine it in her head.

Handel’s original version of The Messiah was scored for a very small orchestra and Abby had arranged her room so each instrument was represented by a different object. The bookshelf on her left was the First Violins, the chest of drawers next door the Second Violins. The faded crimson armchair the First Oboe, the trouser press the Second Oboe, the stuffed bear in the mitre seemed appropriately august to play both bassoons.

Rodney’s beady Cousin Myrtle, gazing down between the windows, which looked on to the back garden, represented the violas. And Abby’s white-and-yellow four-poster, against the right-hand wall, which she hadn’t made yet, had to act as the harpsichord.

The Messiah begins with the entire orchestra playing together loudly and gravely for twenty-four bars. Abby glared round the room to see that everyone was paying attention, paused and raised her baton. Rannaldini was said to have a down beat that could halve butter straight from the freezer. Abby was determined to be as incisive. One, her stick whistled downwards, two to the left, three to the right, and four in a sweeping quarter-circle back to one.

At bar twenty-five after a diminuendo, the tempo changed and she had to cue in the crimson armchair and the chest of drawers after the first beat of the bar, and then bring in the bookshelf and the trouser press, followed four bars later by the stuffed bear, the four-poster and Rodney’s Cousin Myrtle. And all the time she had to sing the tune in a breathless soprano.

Playing away for all their worth, the whole room reached bar ninety-seven, and the first recitative: ‘Comfort Ye…’ Beating eight quavers to the bar with her right hand, Abby exhorted the bookshelf, Cousin Myrtle, the chest of drawers and the four-poster to play slowly and quietly by shaking her left hand, still as rigid as a Dutch doll’s, downwards, as though she were drying her nails. Glancing round she nodded to her dark green bathrobe hanging on the door who was standing in as the tenor.

‘Comfort ye, comfo-ort ye-ee, my pee-eeple,’ sang Abby, quelling Cousin Myrtle with a death-ray glance for coming in too early. As she speeded up the tempo to walking pace for ‘Every Valley,’ she must remember the bassoons, who dodged about all over the place throughout the aria. Nor did she think the stuffed bear was capable of counting thirty-one bars between twiddles, should she forget to cue him in, but somehow they circumnavigated every ‘rough place and crooked straight’, to end with a splendid run of trills from the crimson armchair.

‘Well done, everyone,’ called Abby. ‘Try and be even more together.’

Only the stuffed bear and Cousin Myrtle were looking at her, but in her experience most musicians didn’t bother to look much at conductors.

And now for the first chorus, with a ten-bar allegro tutti, before she stretched out both hands to the gold trees in the orchard outside, who were playing the part of the chorus.

‘And the glory, the glory of the Lord,’ sang the alto apple trees.

‘Terrific, wonderful,’ Abby urged them on. ‘Oh wow,’ she added as she cued in the plums, the, pears and an ancient quince tree, to bring in the basses, sopranos and tenors. It seemed right that such a pretty delicate tree as the pear should sing soprano.

Oh thank God, it was all coming good.

‘And all flesh shall see it together,’ encouraged the apple trees.

Abby worked on frenziedly until the light started fading. She was just about to embark on ‘A Trumpet Shall Sound’, which required a solo trumpet, when she noticed a candidate had rolled up in the form of Shosty who was back, mewing piteously, rubbing his fur against the window pane. She’d been so foul to him earlier. Putting down her baton, Abby opened the window. Leaping onto her shoulder, Shosty smelt of thyme and marjoram, he must have been hunting at the bottom of the mountain.

For a second he purred round her neck, a grey muffler, louder than any percussion player, then jumped onto the table to lick up the butter that had escaped from the smoked salmon souffle.

Although her wrist ached dreadfully, a great peace swept over Abby. She’d had such a good afternoon’s work. How could she have been so foul to Gisela and Rodney? It was she who needed her rough places planed with the most vicious sandpaper. She’d go into Lucerne tomorrow and buy Gisela that new winter coat she’d been talking about.

Abby wandered over to the front window. The sun had set, leaving the lake a drained vermilion. The snowy mountains opposite had turned dark pink like summer or rather autumn puddings, as they rose out of their gold ruff of woods. To the left she could see the island where Hans Richter had practised his French horn. There were no horns in The Messiah. If only some wonderful musician could row over from the island to woo her. She was almost resigned to the loss of Christopher, she no longer jumped with hope each time the telephone rang or the post arrived. But she felt overwhelmed with sadness, like the Marschallin in Der