orchestra.’
Cynical, bored, impatient, menacing, the RSO spread out below her.
‘I like to think of you, Eldred and Hilary, and your clarinets providing the acid yellow of the poplars, right, and the trombones,’ Abby smiled at Dixie, ‘like the stinging saffron of the great oaks, and the flutes, the lovely eerie silver of the whitebeams. Barry’s basses splendid dark evergreens, and of course the horns, Viking and Blue and co., soaring like beech trees topped with radiant dancing pale green.’
‘I don’t want Nugent lifting his leg on me,’ grumbled Viking.
But Abby was in her stride. Looking round at the rapt faces, she thought: I’ve got them at last.
‘I could find trees to illustrate the wonder of the trumpets and the bassoons,’ she smiled forgivingly at Steve Smithson, the union rep, ‘but all I want to say is that like the spring the sound of your individual instruments can blend together to create the beauty of Sibelius-’
But, as she paused to wipe away a tear, Dixie Douglas let out a long and hellish fart.
Immediately Hilary leapt to her feet, flapping her score in horror.
‘Lionel,
And Abby flipped. She was screaming so hysterically at Dixie, that she didn’t hear the door opening at the back of the hall, or notice the laughter freezing on the faces of the players.
Hearing voices, however, she swung round.
‘Get out, get OUT, how many times have I told you, visitors are not allowed in the hall during rehearsals.’
‘Unless they wear gas masks,’ said Viking.
But the visitors came on. Abby swung round again, with the words: ‘Didn’t you fucking hear me?’ dying on her lips. For it was the chairman, a smirking Miles and a handsome, belligerent stranger.
‘Sorry to interrupt you, Abby,’ said Lord Leatherhead heartily, ‘but I just wanted to introduce you all to your new — er — chief executive, George Hungerford.’
All the orchestra clapped in delight.
Surreptitiously, from behind the bulk of Fat Isobel, Candy got out a huge red brush, powdered her nose, then handed the brush to Clare.
George Hungerford had a square jaw, a broken nose, a mouth set like a trap and tired, hard, turned down eyes behind horn-rimmed spectacles. He looked as tough as a limestone cliff and about as unscalable. He had thick hair, which was cropped very close to his head and the colour and strokeable texture of a bullrush. His dark grey suit was well cut to set off flat, broad shoulders, but also to disguise a spreading midriff.
‘He looks like a bouncer,’ murmured Randy Hamilton.
‘And we all know who we want him to chuck out,’ murmured back Dixie.
George then mounted the stage and told the orchestra in a broad Yorkshire accent, how much he was looking forward to working with them. As he talked, his eyes moved solemnly over each player as though he was memorizing their faces for some future conjuring trick.
He didn’t envisage any great problems, he said.
‘Running an orchestra’s like running any other business. If it doesn’t make a profit, you make changes. I’d like to look at what you’re all up to before I make any decisions.’ Then he added without a flicker of a smile, ‘And I hope you all play a bloody sight better this evening.’
‘Why the hell’s George Hungerford interested in us?’ Viking asked Blue. ‘His usual form is bribing planning officers and knee-capping little old sitting-tenants.’
‘I’d lie down in front of his bulldozer any day,’ sighed Candy.
‘Looks ruthless,’ said Hilary, with a sniff.
‘He is, too,’ giggled Clare, the orchestra Sloane. ‘His wife was called Ruth. They split up last year. I read all about it in the
‘You should know,’ said Hilary bitchily.
Abby slunk back to the Old Bell, mortified that George’s first impression should have been of a sweaty, shaggy, screaming virago. Tonight she would wow him.
As if in anticipation, two cardboard boxes of ge-owns were awaiting her from Parker’s; horrors in mauve, lime-green, jaundice-yellow and the most shocking pink, encrusted with rhinestones, sequins and
Accompanying them was a handwritten, bullying note, urging Abby to make George’s first night special with an evening gown fitting the occasion in every sense. Mrs Parker had somehow got hold of Abby’s measurements.
Incensed at being dictated to, Abby didn’t even try them on, merely washing her hair and dressing in the flowing indigo trouser suit she’d worn at her debut concert.
She wished she had a friend in the orchestra with whom to discuss George. He had seemed so forceful because he’d made no attempt to ingratiate himself. He had certainly electrified the women in the orchestra. Parker’s sold out of scented body lotion by closing time, and scuffles broke out in the changing room, as the prettiest girls fought for a glimpse in the communal mirror as they applied blusher and knotted coloured ribbons in their hair.
Hilary was livid, on George’s first night, that Eldred and not she was playing the clarinet solo in the
‘That dress is much too low, Nellie,’ she snapped. ‘You know we can’t show bare arms or cleavages.’
‘Some of us haven’t got cleavages to show,’ said Nellie, rudely as she sprayed
‘With all the different floral scents wafting from the orchestra,’ giggled Candy to Clare, ‘Abby’s going to get her image of a spring meadow, if not a wood.’
Abby was desperate for everything to go well, but, alas, the concert was a disaster. Some joker had slotted a page from Dixie’s porn mag into the middle of her
The hall was half-empty and the pouring rain, which had discouraged random ticket buyers, dripped through the roof on Abby’s head, but failed to extinguish the fire in a local bakery, so the first movement of Sibelius was ruined by clanging fire-engines. Worst of all, one of Miss Priddock’s programme sellers, over-excited by the arrival of George Hungerford, charged back and forth to the Ladies throughout, and when a chain wouldn’t pull, started furiously clanking in syncopation to the heroic swinging tune in the horns, reducing the RSO to more fits of laughter.
‘Delhi Belly Variations,’ murmured Viking to Blue as he emptied water out of his horn.
But at last they reached the six wonderfully dramatic hammer blows, which test any conductor, because an audience can often assume the whole thing’s finished and start clapping too early.
Abby’s pauses were the longest and most dramatic ever heard in the H.P. Hall, but during the penultimate silence, the chain in the Ladies clanked again. Dixie Douglas promptly corpsed and came in a beat too soon. Forgetting herself, an incensed Abby raised two very public fingers at him and, running off the platform, locked herself in the conductor’s room, refusing to acknowledge any of the applause. She needed a showdown with George so she could pour out her grievances, but when she finally unlocked the door the place was deserted, and the caretaker was locking up.
Escaping through a side-door, Abby found the rain had stopped, and breathed in a lovely smell of wet earth and the lilies of the valley which Old Cyril had planted under Miss Priddock’s window.
During concerts, the orchestral car-park was jam-packed with small used cars, vans, old Volvos with different coloured doors, Morris Minors and Viking’s ancient BMW with the ‘Hit Me, I Need the Money’ sticker in the back. It was now deserted except for a blue Rolls Royce and one of George Hungerford’s heavies in a chauffeur’s uniform and a state of shock.
‘Fort we’d never escape wivout injury,’ he patted the Rolls’ bonnet, ‘but it was empty in five minutes. Vroom, vroom, vroom. No-one ‘it us. Never seen driving like it.’
‘Glad they do something well.’
