Eyes missing nothing, gesticulating exquisitely with his beautiful hands, the right one keeping time, the left exhorting his musicians on, he let them have their heads. Economical with his movements, even his stick hand twitching no more than the tail of a cat watching a bird through a window, Rannaldini lulled them into a false sense of security. Perhaps the audience in Vienna had been right, after all.

Then he unleashed his fury, like a Fascist police squad moving in on a defenceless mob with cudgels, finding fault after fault with the performance until the women were in tears, the men grey and shaking, and shredded India rubber covered the floor where they’d erased Oswaldo’s instructions on their scores and replaced them with Rannaldini’s.

Able to identify a wrong note ten miles away, he singled out an oboe player. ‘You make a hundred meestakes.’

‘It’s difficult that bit,’ stammered the player.

‘Rubbish,’ thundered Rannaldini.

Strolling down from the rostrum he picked up the oboe and played it perfectly.

‘You haven’t practised. You’re fired.’ He handed back the oboe.

Then he noticed Bob Harefield’s charming Humpty Dumpty face with its tired bruised eyes, and shouted that he would not conduct on Sunday unless the twenty-four musicians Bob had hired in his absence were fired as well.

‘I no Okkay them,’ he screamed.

‘But every seat is sold, Maestro, and what about the BBC and Catchitune?’ said the manager of the Mozart Hall, almost in tears.

‘It weel ’ave to be cancelled,’ snarled Rannaldini. ‘I weel not play with peegs.’ Howling, he turned on his orchestra and would have kicked over a few music-stands if his handmade black shoes hadn’t been new.

‘I ’ear you murder Beethoven Nine. Poor Beethoven I ’ope they didn’t restore his ’earing in ’eaven. I ’ave tape of Radio Three programme last week when you abort The Creation.’

‘We got very good reviews for both,’ protested Bob, putting a comforting arm round the shoulder of the sacked oboist.

‘Reviewers are stupid peegs, and I want heem sacked,’ Rannaldini pointed at the front-desk violinist who’d rushed in late.

‘We can’t sack him,’ whispered Bob. ‘His wife’s just left him.’

‘Sensible woman,’ said Rannaldini, then, his voice rising to a shriek, ‘I want heem fired.’

A diversion was caused by the cleaner who started hoovering again at the back of the stalls.

‘Another sensible woman,’ said Rannaldini, ‘trying to obliterate this cacophony.’

A further diversion was caused by the arrival of Hermione swathed in mink to sing in the fourth movement.

‘I refuse to put those poor furriers out of business,’ she was saying to her entourage of agent, secretary, make-up girl, seamstress and lighting specialist. ‘I, for one, believe people come before animals.’

Having kissed her on both cheeks, Rannaldini calmed down a little.

‘We will move on to the last movement, since Mrs Harefield has done you the honour of turning up and, unlike you, knows the score.’

Hermione was a nightmare to work with. Beneath the façade of gushing serenity, she was ruthlessly egotistical, always making a fuss about dressing rooms and acoustics, taking against members of the orchestra, or other soloists, creating fearful anxiety as to whether she would go on at all, leaving everyone drained because she’d milked them of so many compliments. Then, once she opened her mouth, her performance would be flawless.

Today as she flapped around, fussing about being properly lit, her husband Bob went quietly round the orchestra smoothing feathers. Holding the score, eating an apple to moisten her throat, Hermione listened unmoved while Rannaldini bawled out a beautiful little blond female flautist who, out of terror, had fluffed the introductory bars before Hermione’s entrance.

Waiting for the nod to bring her in, Hermione stood on Rannaldini’s left, as she had so often in the past while he was making her famous in every capital in the world. It still gave Rannaldini a charge. Hermione couldn’t act for the percussionist’s toffee. She always sacrificed acting for beauty of tone. She irritated the hell out of Rannaldini, but when she opened her mouth and that ripple of angelic sound soared full and clear above the orchestra, he could forgive her anything. In return she seemed to be making love to him with her huge brown eyes, grateful to him for conjuring up magic she was unaware she possessed.

The orchestra watched her wonderful bosom rising and falling with a mixture of lust and dislike, but at the end they gave her a round of applause and even the odd bravo because she expected it.

‘Excellent, Mrs Harefield.’ Rannaldini’s flat bitchy voice could sink to reverberatingly seductive depths when he was in a conciliatory mood.

‘But as for you lot, go ’ome and practise. This is the score.’ Picking it off the floor, he hurled it into the orchestra, narrowly missing a lady clarinetist. ‘Now steek to eet, and eef you ’aven’t learn it properly by tomorrow, I won’t go on on Sunday.’ And he stalked out, leaving Hermione, who was expecting lunch at San Lorenzo, mouthing in outrage.

‘What can we do?’ asked the manager of the Mozart Hall in despair. ‘You can’t sack all those musicians.’

Bob shrugged. ‘Rannaldini’s just jackbooting around because he’s been away and he can’t bear his orchestra playing well for someone else. Also,’ Bob dropped his voice, ‘Cecilia — wife number two — is in London. She’s come over for Lucia at Covent Garden, so he wanted an excuse to storm out early and take her to lunch and double bed at The Savoy. She lives in New York, but he always sleeps with her when she comes over, or if he’s in New York.’

‘What’s she like?’ asked the leader of the orchestra, forgetting his hangover.

‘Little black mamba in little black numbers. Eats men for breakfast, or would if she wasn’t always on a diet.’ Bob shook with laughter.

‘Goodness,’ said the sacked oboe player, momentarily roused out of his despondency, ‘Does Hermione know?’

‘Christ, no! Why upset her? Cecilia’s supposed to be going down to Bagley Hall this evening to some end-of-term concert. Boris Levitsky’s the music master so the standard may have improved a little. I suppose Rannaldini may roll up as well, and Hermione. They’ll all fly in different helicopters.’

‘That guy’s a saint,’ said the leader of the orchestra, as Bob moved off to calm Hermione down.


17



Bagley Hall was a chic progressive boarding-school set amid rolling green parkland on the edge of the Rutminster-Gloucestershire border. The parents, who tended to be arty or from the media, had chosen the school mostly because they heard the music was wonderful, and they believed that their somewhat problematical darlings wouldn’t come to much harm amid such remote rural surroundings. The former assumption was certainly true since Boris Levitsky had become music master. Last seen threatening to beat up Lysander for comforting his wife Rachel after they met in a London chemist’s, Boris had shortly afterwards left the London Met, where he had worked as an assistant conductor, in an attempt to save his marriage.

Boris had loathed being an assistant conductor, which meant he was a glorified understudy, who took rehearsals, memorized scores and kept a tailcoat hanging in a cupboard backstage, ready to come on at a moment’s notice — but alas the moment never came.

This, with the added frustration of never getting any of his compositions published or performed, had driven Boris into the ego boost of an affaire with Chloe the mezzo.

Envious of Boris’s genius both as composer and conductor and not wanting competition at the London Met, Rannaldini had actively helped him to get the job at Bagley Hall, not least because he felt his daughter Natasha, and less so his son Wolfgang, who was in his last year and musically disinclined, could do with some decent teaching.

Boris found teaching much worse than being an assistant conductor. It was so draining that he had no effort left for composition. He was thirty-one and he was aware of time running out, particularly now that Europe, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, was flooded with Russian musicians. His novelty value was ebbing away. He would never achieve recognition.

Now the concert hall was filling up. Through the thick green velvet curtains, Boris could see Kitty Rannaldini, so sweet and downtrodden being ignored by her stepdaughter, Natasha. A voluptuous sixteen year old, almost incestuously in love with her father, Natasha had inherited both Cecilia’s and Rannaldini’s histrionic temperaments but not alas their talent. Her voice was powerful, but harsh. Assuming it must be good, however, she never listened to criticism.

Boris’s best pupil was Marcus Campbell-Black, who at seventeen played the piano with such sensitivity and imagination that there was little left to teach him. Through the curtain, Boris could see Marcus’s father, the legendarily handsome Rupert. Only dragged here on sufferance by his wife Taggie, Rupert was determined to leave early. He didn’t want to be buttonholed by his ex-wife Helen, who was sitting in the row behind.

Rupert had not forgiven Helen for not sending Marcus to his old school, Harrow. Convinced that there was no money in playing the piano as a career, it had taken Rupert a long time to get over the shock, four years ago, when Marcus had timidly announced that he wanted to become a concert pianist.

Today Rupert was worrying about the recession. At Venturer, the local ITV company of which he was a director, advertising had slumped. The bloodstock market had also taken ä dive. Finally he had been up all night with a sick filly, who was a distinct possibility for the Guineas and The Oaks and he wanted to get back to her.