Jilly Cooper - Appassionata

‘About four months, but we’ve only seen each other twice, and it’s over now, I promise.’

‘You son-of-a-bitch,’ screamed Abby, banging her fist down on her bedside table scattering ashtrays and message pads. ‘Two-timing me exactly like Christopher did, only wanting me for the dough. You fucker! Why didn’t you break it off, instead of making a goddamn idiot of me? God, I hate you, hate you, hate you.’ Her voice rose to a hysterical scream.

But Marcus couldn’t breathe and couldn’t answer, so Abby slammed down the telephone, and sat shuddering on the bed, clenching and unclenching her hands, her eyes darting madly round the room.

Lord Leatherhead got a miniature brandy out of the fridge and poured it into a glass. He wasn’t enjoying this at all. When the telephone rang again Miles snatched it up. It was The Scorpion. ‘I’m afraid Miss Rosen has no comment to make,’ said Miles, then ordered the switchboard not to put through any more calls.

‘The Scorpion has already been on to us with the whole story,’ he told Abby bleakly. ‘It reflects disastrously on the orchestra. First their musical director posing naked with a lover to promote a pop record-’

‘Beattie Johnson stitched me up,’ whispered Abby. ‘She stole that photograph.’

‘But you gave her the interview. All that nauseating claptrap about being ma-a-a-dly in love,’ Miles lingered lubriciously over the word.

He’s loving this, thought Abby numbly.

‘Then we learn,’ he added silkily, ‘that you’ve both got other people and are only masquerading as lovers to push the record.’

‘That’s bullshit,’ shouted Abby. ‘I loved Marcus. I’m supposed to be marrying the guy. I didn’t know anything about him being gay.’

‘You’ve hardly been a vestal virgin yourself and your orchestra are so nauseatingly avaricious it can’t be long before one of them sells the story of you and Viking to The Scorpion.’

‘I’m not having an affaire with Viking,’ hissed Abby.

Miles gave her a pained look of utter disbelief. ‘What about the night Rodney died? There are dozens of witnesses.’

‘That was a one-night stand, everyone was plastered. Hilary was there. She probably shopped us to The Scorpion. It only happened once, for Chrissake.’

‘I find that very hard to believe. Anyway, it’s going to be all over The Evening Scorpion this afternoon, and all the other papers will carry the story tomorrow, bringing utter disrepute on the orchestra. The one thing the Press hate is being cynically manipulated.’

‘I didn’t manipulate them, right,’ Abby was hysterical. ‘I genuinely believed Marcus and I were getting married. Look, he gave me this ring,’ she held out her right hand.

‘A virtuous woman should have a price above rubies,’ said Miles sarcastically, as he selected a Granny Smith from Abby’s fruit bowl. Hilly’s new diet had done wonders for his spots.

‘I was only pushing “Madly in Love”,’ gibbered Abby, ‘because the orchestra got half the royalties.’

‘I’m afraid we don’t want your — er — ill-gotten gains.’

‘We had an emergency board meeting this morning,’ said Lord Leatherhead gently. ‘There was a unanimous vote demanding your resignation.’

‘I can see Hilly voting me out, but not Bill Thackery — Bill’s a good friend.’

‘Not so you would know it,’ Miles bit viciously into the apple. ‘He’s never forgiven you for not making him leader after Lionel left, nor for giving his solo back to Julian.’

‘Oh for Chrissake.’

‘You can’t expect to conduct the orchestra with such a scandal hanging over you,’ added Lord Leatherhead. ‘We’ll honour your contract and pay you up to the end of February.’

‘George is still chief executive. He won’t let you fire me.’

‘Having seduced a member of the orchestra almost half his age,’ said Miles fastidiously, ‘I hardly think George, or his opinion, would carry much weight. I doubt either if he’d be very interested. He hasn’t even had the manners to leave a telephone number.’

‘But I can’t let the orchestra down.’ Leaping forward, Abby clung to Miles’s new lapels. ‘Please, please!’

‘You’ve let them down enough already.’

‘Who’s going to conduct them at such short notice?’

But Abby already knew the answer.

‘Rannaldini has very kindly agreed to step into the breach,’ said Miles triumphantly.

At St Theresa’s, Marcus came off the telephone in total shock, wheezing in short bursts like a frantically panting dog. Oh poor darling Abby, he must get to her and stop her killing herself. He couldn’t find his puffer, he’d never make it upstairs to inject himself with steroids. No-one was about to help him. Lurching into the common room he found the score of the Schumann concerto open on the upright piano, with all his instructions pencilled in. But where he’d scribbled ‘Ped’ for Pedal, someone in emerald-green ink had turned the word to ‘Pederast’. Giving a choked sob, frantically battling for the tiniest breath, he stumbled into the hall, out through the front door, slap into a cameraman and a girl reporter.

‘It’s him,’ the reporter proffered her tape-recorder as casually as if it had been a packet of fags. ‘How long have you been having an affaire with Nemerovsky?’

But Marcus, blue in the face, could only give desperate little whimpers, stretching out pleading hands for help.

‘You sure it’s him,’ said the photographer snapping away like a jackal, ‘more like some kind of deaf mute.’

‘Probably a ruse to fox us,’ said the girl. ‘Have you told Abby yet, Marcus?’

‘Looks as though he’s having an epi. You OK, mate?’ the photographer lowered his camera.

Ducking round them, Marcus collapsed with a crash on the stone steps.

‘Christ, someone better give him the kiss of life,’ said the reporter.

‘Don’t touch him,’ shouted the doctor, who’d arrived to treat Carl’s tendonitis, then taking one look at Marcus. ‘He’s having a massive asthma attack.’

Fortunately in his car he had a portable nebulizer, a breath mask, which delivered the drug Marcus so desperately needed in tiny drops of damp air. In an attempt to rally him, the doctor also gave him a steroid injection, but Marcus was too far gone, the blue had a purple tinge now, his airways had closed up like one of Simon’s oboe reeds, and he was too weak and exhausted to draw in air through such minuscule holes.

The doctor had to make a lightning decision. It would take too long to summon an ambulance. Appleton’s little cottage hospital only worked skeleton shifts at weekends; Marcus must be rushed the ten miles to Northladen General.

‘You drive,’ he ordered the cameraman, as they laid Marcus down in the back of his estate car, ‘I’ll look after him and direct you. You telephone Northladen Intensive Care, and tell them he’s going to need a ventilator,’ he added to the reporter.

‘Who is he anyway?’ he asked as the cameraman, used to chasing Princess Di round Gloucestershire, hurtled at a steady 80 m.p.h. between high stone walls.

‘Rupert Campbell-Black’s son — what d’you give his chances?’ the reporter had kept on her tape-recorder.

‘Not a lot, he’s not responding at all, poor little sod. I wonder if he’s been taking beta-blockers, a lot of contestants do to calm the nerves. Fatal with asthma.’

Aware that they had a ‘very important patient’, Intensive Care was already all stations go. Within seconds of his arrival, to the accompaniment of bells and flashing lights, a lifeless, unconscious Marcus had been laid on a bed, and given an injection to paralyse him totally. This was so that he couldn’t resist the transparent tube which had been shoved down his throat, and which was now pumping air and oxygen from a huge black box into his lungs.

‘Christ,’ muttered the anaesthetist, glancing at the box to judge the extent of the resistance in Marcus’s lungs, ‘he’s up to eighty.’

‘Is that bad?’ asked the reporter, who, passing herself off as Marcus’s sister, had infiltrated herself into the room.

‘Let’s say a normal person’s between ten and twenty.’ Then catching a flicker of terror in Marcus’s staring eyes, the anaesthetist put on a heartier voice, ‘It’s all right, lad, we’ve had to paralyse you, only temporarily, to keep the tube down your throat. This is to sedate you, so you don’t fight against it.’ And he plunged another injection into Marcus’s arm. ‘Don’t fret yourself, we’ll soon have you breathing on your own.’