As the clock edged towards a quarter past ten, and there was no sign of her, the students reluctantly dispersed, except for a tall boy wearing a navy-blue baseball cap to dry his hair flat, and a girl with a dark red bob, who was scornfully reading a letter which had been pinned to the notice-board:


Dear Musicians,

Thank you for making music with me so delightfully. I must congratulate the Academy on a super orchestra.

With great pleasure

Hermione Harefield

‘Stupid cowpat,’ muttered the girl, and getting out a biro she wrote: PS. If David, the hunky First Trombone, wants to pop in to the Old Mill, Paradise, he’ll be most welcome to a bed for the afternoon.

‘Flo-rah, stop it,’ chided the boy. ‘You’re going to be seriously late.’

‘Oh, all right.’ Grabbing her viola case, Flora hop-scotched across the black-and-white checked floor slap into her teacher.

‘Why the hell aren’t you warming up?’ he said furiously. ‘I put my head on the block putting you forward for this, don’t you dare let me down.’

‘Yes Mr French, sorry Mr French, promise to do my best, Mr French.’

Flora scampered off into the Duke’s Hall where gold-framed portraits of illustrious former students looked down from paprika-red walls on to a packed audience of students, parents, teachers and talent scouts.

Two friends had kept a seat in the back row for the boy in the baseball cap. Flora sauntered up onto the stage where the Academy orchestra, grumbling about the cold after the sunshine outside, were tuning up, practising difficult solos and runs in different directions like skaters. Both sexes were huddled in sweaters and trousers, wore clumpy shoes or trainers and no make-up. The only way you could distinguish the girls was by their long flowing undyed hair, which was mostly drawn back from high clear foreheads, although a few, in Abby’s honour, had turned up with wild Appassionata gypsy curls.

The object today was for this year’s student conductors, who sat in a nervous nail-biting row behind the horns, to try out their skills on the Academy orchestra in the first movement of Bartók’s Viola Concerto.

Flora was playing the solo and she and the musicians had endlessly to repeat the same bits as one conductor after another fumblingly attempted to control the orchestra and were repeatedly taken apart by a genial but highly critical professor, who sat in the second desk of the second violins with a score making notes.

The Bartók concerto is extremely difficult, and with all the stopping and starting, the timpanist, the percussion and the brass (including Hermione’s hunky trombone player) had very little to do, except count bars between the occasional flurry of notes, which they often missed because the conductors forgot to bring them in.

‘You’re not keeping the orchestra down enough,’ shouted the professor to a sweating Swede, who was flapping on the rostrum as though he were about to fly through the vaulted roof. ‘We can’t hear Flora.’

‘Just as well,’ Flora grinned at the Japanese leader, who had a lean beautiful body and a face like a Red Indian. ‘It’s the cadenza next. I’ll need scaffolding and oxygen to reach that top A. What the hell’s happened to L’Appassionata?’

To fox any press who had in fact been humiliatingly non-existent, Abby had been smuggled in by a back door. Shivering behind dark glasses, dying of nerves, she was dickering whether to rush out and be sick again. How could she do justice to such a beautiful piece, particularly when the orchestra were only playing it for the first time?

The soloist, Abby decided, was extremely good. She needed to work on her technique; she ground to a halt twice in the cadenza, and burst out laughing when during a really sad bit she’d caught a friend’s eye in the audience, but generally she executed the high notes effortlessly and joyfully and in the lower register the sound was mellow, dark and mysterious.

She was also extremely attractive. Her figure was hidden by baggy black trousers and a thick black cardigan, but she had a clear pale gold skin, merry green eyes, a plump face ending in a pointed chin and her shining bob was the same warm burnt-sienna as her viola.

Above all, she played with total insouciance keeping up a stream of badinage with the orchestra, chewing gum and reading her tattered poetry book every time there was a pause. Now she was sitting on the lean thigh of the Japanese leader awaiting the next victim, a plump Greek called Adonis, who had soft white hands and gold teeth to match his gold corduroy shirt. All his friends trooped round behind the brass section to video him conducting.

‘Like photographing the captain of the Titanic,’ murmured Flora, getting to her feet.

Sweat was glistening on her upper lip, a russet lock had fallen away from the tortoiseshell slide. There was a chorus of wolf-whistles as she took off her black cardigan to reveal a dark green T-shirt embroidered with yellow daisies and tucked into a wide leather belt.

‘Vy d’you have to distract me viz striptease?’ grumbled Adonis. ‘Now don’t vorry, I vill follow you.’

‘I don’t vant you following me, I want you with me,’ said Flora, raising her viola.

Adonis tried very hard, but the orchestra were all over the place. The genial professor sighed. He was going to have his work cut out with this lot.

That soloist is smart, thought Abby wistfully. Adonis was now going much too fast, but she always caught up.

Glancing sideways, she noticed the boy with the baseball cap. Totally still, really listening, he followed every note Flora played. What a beauty, thought Abby, he’s the one who ought to be called Adonis.

A punch-up was narrowly avoided because Adonis skipped another page and missed out the hunky trombonist’s last entry yet again.

Abby, who’d been studying the concerto for the last fortnight, couldn’t bear to hear it so butchered. But would she do any better? The notes of the score swum meaninglessly before her eyes. Oh God, she hoped she wasn’t going to be sick again.

Adonis was followed by Lorenzo, a handsome Italian who made beautiful gestures, but who seemed more interested in ogling Flora and the video cameras.

‘This one’s got two left hands,’ murmured the professor as Lorenzo kept smoothing his hair with his right hand.

‘You’ve occasionally got to beat in time, Lorenzo,’ he called out. ‘No matter how emotional you feel, you’ve got to first and foremost be a traffic policeman so the orchestra can follow and know where they are, particularly in a piece with so many changes of tempo.’

‘I try again.’

This time extravagant waving and fists clenched to heaven were followed by four bars of total silence.

‘Where am I?’ Lorenzo smote his noble brow.

‘In the Duke’s Hall,’ giggled Flora.

‘You’re lost,’ said the professor.

‘But not forgotten.’ Parking her chewing-gum on the side of the rostrum, Flora gave Lorenzo a kiss.

‘That is a disgusting habit, Flora,’ reproved the professor.

‘I don’t know what score you studied, Lorenzo, but I don’t think it was Bartók’s Viola Concerto.’

The orchestra grinned. Lorenzo turned scarlet, and started to argue.

‘Discuss it with me later,’ said the professor firmly. ‘We’ve got time for one more before lunch.’

The rest of the conductors, waiting behind the horns, leapt to their feet like MPs frantic to speak, but the professor had nodded to the back of the hall.

‘Here comes Abby,’ said Flora, sliding off the leader’s knee.

The Japanese boy looked round.

‘That is not her.’

‘Bet you a tenner.’

‘I don’t have your kind of money.’

Few of the audience or musicians recognized Abby. She was so thin and wore black jeans, a Black-Watch tartan shirt, dark glasses and no make-up. Her hair was short and curly like the young Paganini. The scarlet pouting lips, the clinging minis, the wild gypsy voluptuousness had all gone.

‘Car-worker rather than Carmen,’ murmured Flora.

Abby gave nobody any time to give her a cheer. She carried no score, only a baton, as she loped up the hall and jumped up onto the rostrum. As she whipped off her glasses, the orchestra could see the imperiousness in those strange, unblinking yellow eyes, which was belied by the white knuckles and the frantically knocking knees. For a second she was grabbed by utter panic, her mind a snowstorm. How could she have been so stupid as to conduct without a score?

Then she said quietly; ‘This is a beautiful piece, let’s give it some shape and feeling.’

She suggested some small alterations to the strings and woodwind, then turned to the brass and the percussion. ‘I’m afraid you guys don’t have much to do, which makes it easier to goof off. I’ll try and make things as clear as possible for you. Good luck.’

Her hand, as she raised it, was shaking so crazily even Bartók couldn’t have captured the cross-rhythms, but once she brought it down the entire hall realized who she was, because she was in a class of her own.

The beat of her right hand was knife-edge clear and, although her left hand was a little stiff, she still couldn’t splay her fingers or cup her hand, she managed to show the orchestra exactly what she wanted and in addition convey the emotional intensity she needed. The one vestige of the old Abby was the way she swayed to the music like a dancer.

But she had only to glare at the brass to shut them up and she completely enslaved the trombones by bringing them in exactly right and giving them a radiant smile of approval afterwards.