Appassionata

After supper, leaving the others to drink and gossip, Marcus settled down to play the piano. Boris’s flat was on the second floor of a four-sided block which looked out on to a square of garden dominated by a huge golden catalpa.

It was so mild that people in the surrounding flats opened their windows, wrapping their children in duvets, so they could all listen to Marcus until the stars came out, clapping and cheering whenever he stopped and shouting for him to go on.

‘Audience don’t do zat for me,’ grumbled Boris. ‘But he is good boy,’ he confided to Abby, ‘I teach him piano at school. Ven Rachel die he turn up at the house asking what he could do, looking after kids, helping me sort things out. He is gentle, but he is not at all vimp and he play like dream.’

Abby, a bit drunk now, was equally enchanted but also tearful. She must not neglect her physio.

Having dispatched the Grande Polonnaise with a great flourish, Marcus got out more music and launched into a modern piece, explosions of crashing notes, interspersed with a sad, haunting tune.

‘That’s beautiful,’ called out Abby. ‘What is it?’

‘Ees familiar.’ Boris looked perplexed.

‘Bloody well should be,’ said Marcus. ‘It’s part of the “Dies Irae” from Rachel’s Requiem. I finished transcribing it last night.’

‘I wrote that?’ Boris leapt to his feet. ‘Play it again. Where’s my violin?’

‘Under the sofa,’ said Flora.

Impatiently Boris tuned up and began to play the main tune with Marcus accompanying. Marcus’s copying was dark and clear which made it very easy to read.

Having Jewish blood like Abby, Boris tended to soup up the melody, playing very emotionally with great rhetorical gestures.

‘This is very grateful piece,’ he told Abby and Flora in delight.

‘You mean rewarding,’ corrected Flora. ‘Yes, it’s breathtaking. Like Bartok, “full of hitherto undreamed of possibilities”.’

Occasionally stopping to change a note, totally absorbed, they played on.

‘Marcus is seriously good,’ Abby told Flora. ‘Nothing can stop him making it.’

‘Let’s make some coffee,’ Flora led Abby into the kitchen.

‘Marcus is happy and relaxed at the moment,’ she went on, ‘because he’s among friends and he’s had the odd drink but he’s crippled by nerves, throwing up for hours before concerts, and he’s already had to cancel two recitals because of asthma attacks, which doesn’t help in the music world, which hates unreliability.

‘Shall we wash up?’ Flora looked unenthusiastically at the supper plates.

But, as the dish-washer was still working overtime, gurgling away cleaning all the silver and china they’d unearthed from the sitting-room, she decided to leave it.

‘Nothing ever gets clean that I wash by hand.’

After some rootling around she found a tin of Gold Blend in the breadbin and, unable to find a spoon, shook some coffee into four cups.

‘Also,’ she added, switching on the kettle, ‘Marcus has a terrible hang-up about Rupert, who doesn’t see the point of him at all.’

‘But Rupert seemed so caring in BA,’ said Abby perplexed. ‘And when he visited me in the hospital.’

‘Rupert’s dazzling,’ agreed Flora, ‘but the brighter the moon, the darker the shadow it casts and it’s no fun being son of Superstud. Rupert’s always preferred Tabitha, Marcus’s younger sister, and he passionately disapproves of his son and heir taking up anything as drippy as the piano, when he should be at home learning how to run the estate.’

‘How did it turn out with those kids Rupert adopted?’

‘That’s the worst part,’ sighed Flora. ‘I’m afraid there’s no milk. Rupert’s totally besotted with the boy, Xavier, cured his squint and nearly his birthmark, got him racing round on Lysander’s old Shetland pony. Rupert’s got the tearaway he’s always wanted,’ Flora lowered her voice. ‘It’s crucified Marcus.’

Returning to the living-room, Abby heard a voluptuous explosion of notes, and gave a cry of joy. Marcus was playing Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata.

‘It’s so darling, to play that — well — sort of in my honour.’ She went over to the piano.

‘Sort of,’ Marcus blushed, being a truthful boy. ‘Next week I’m also playing it in a recital at college.’

‘I’ll come along,’ said Abby in excitement, making Marcus blush even more darkly. ‘Did you know that to understand the Appassionata, Beethoven said you have to read The Tempest?

This music crept by me upon the waters,

Allaying both their fury, and my passion,

With its sweet air.’

Marcus nodded. ‘My stepfather told me, and quoted the same lines. Sorry,’ as a flurry of wrong notes resulted, ‘I’m no good at talking and playing.’

Abby retreated to the sofa.

‘God, my back aches,’ said Flora, who was plaiting Boris’s hair. ‘Three hours of Bartok takes it out of you.’

‘I’ve got some Ibuleve in the bathroom,’ said Boris.

A smell of bonfires was still drifting in through the open window. Glancing at his watch Marcus saw it was nearly eleven o’clock. They were still clamouring for more in the flats outside. He’d better stop soon or the kids would never get to bed. He launched into Roger Quilter’s Children’s Overture.

‘There was a lady loved a swine,’ sang Flora, as she returned with the Ibuleve.

That’s a stunning voice, too, thought Abby in envy. Goodness they were a talented trio!

Flora slumped between Boris’s knees, calmly pulling off her daisy-embroidered T-shirt and using it to cover high, pointed breasts, as Boris began to rub the gel into her shoulders.

And I wonder what their relationship is, thought Abby.

Glancing across the room as he launched into ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’ Marcus met Abby’s eyes, saw the admiration in them and thought how lovely she looked, her strong, proud face softened by the lamplight. She was much more boyish than he’d expected. Sitting on the sofa, her long legs tucked underneath her, she looked like a model for Gentleman’s Quarterly.

Marcus’s timidity with women had been exacerbated two years ago at the stag-party of Basil Baddington, one of his father’s wilder cronies. Rupert, irked by Marcus’s apparent lack of interest in girls (after all, he was supposed to produce an heir one day), had organized a hooker.

Marcus had been quite unable to get it up and had been violently sick. Terror, which makes people take deeper breaths, triggered off a violent asthma attack, which could have been fatal. The whole thing was hushed up by Rupert’s GP, the admirably unflappable James Benson, who got Marcus onto a nebulizer at the local hospital just in time.

Before he’d lost consciousness, miserably aware of regurgitated wine all down his dress-shirt, Marcus had heard James Benson reproving his father.

‘You must be more careful with him, Rupert, you know he’s never been strong.’

By mutual agreement neither Taggie nor Marcus’s mother had been told of this disaster, but Marcus’s relationship with Rupert, always shaky, had inevitably deteriorated.

Reluctant to witness the love he had always craved, so unstintingly lavished on little Xavier, Marcus had avoided Pensombe and concentrated on his career. Girls, except Flora who was more of a pal, were avoided even though they chased him like mad, not least because of his father’s bank balance.

Last night after copying out Boris’s score until long after midnight, Marcus had collapsed into bed, only to be jolted by a terrifyingly erotic dream about Boris, and woken, sobbing his heart out because it could never be possible.

Having dreaded confronting Boris today, he was ecstatic to find himself suddenly so attracted to Abby. His blue shirt was still stiff from the salt of the tears she’d shed outside Madame Tussauds. All this added radiance to