Cecilia had not played cricket at school but she finally caught Rannaldini on the corner of his other eye with a powder-blue egg. Storming out, she sent flying a blonde in a white towelling dressing gown who’d just emerged from the flat of the editor of The Scorpion to see what the fuss was about. At which moment, laughing her head off, Flora emerged from the shower, having witnessed the whole thing through a two-way mirror.

‘Oh dear.’ She touched Rannaldini’s two fast blackening eyes. ‘Now there are two Pandas in Paradise!’

Rannaldini had conducted with peritonitis, with snakebite, even with a sprained right wrist before now, but he refused to expose himself to ridicule. Ringing Bob he croaked down the telephone that he was dying of pneumonia. Shrouded in dark glasses and a black fedora, he flew off to a retreat in the Alps.

Over in Richmond in Chloe’s drawing room, Boris Levitsky wrestled with a two-hour lecture on Mahler, which he had to deliver at Cotchester University the following day and tried not to brood over Rannaldini’s vile letter returning his symphony.

Chloe was out recording the Alto Rhapsody, one of her first big breaks. She would probably go out to dinner with the director and the conductor afterwards and not be home for hours.

Bearing in mind Boris’s fondness for red meat and red wine and red-blooded women, she had left him a bottle of Pedrotti now being warmed by the evening sun, which he had vowed not to touch until he had finished his lecture. In the fridge was a large steak with instructions how long to grill it on each side and a pierced baked potato to put in the top right of the Aga an hour before he wanted to eat.

Chloe herself, however, had been less red-blooded since Boris moved in. As he was hopelessly impractical, she had to look after him and, as he hadn’t sold a single composition and had packed in his job at Bagley Hall, she had had to support him as well. Finally last week, with the thought: Why doesn’t the stroppy cow get off her ass? ringing through her head, she had had to write a cheque for Rachel’s maintenance.

This had been the greatest humiliation of Boris’s life, which was why he had fired off his new symphony to Rannaldini. Groaning, he wrenched his mind back to his lecture.

‘God, I could endure anything,’ Mahler had written in despair to a woman fan, after paying the Berlin Phil to perform his second symphony, ‘if only the future of my work seemed secure. I am now thirty-five years old, uncelebrated, very unperformed. But I keep busy and don’t let it get me down. I have patience. I wait.’

Boris didn’t have patience — Chloe said it was like living with a good-looking bear — nor did he have the cash to pay the London Met to perform his symphony, which that shit Rannaldini had torn to shreds. Outside, the turning trees were casting long shadows of evening across the park. A young mother with a pack of dusty, happy children walked past carrying a picnic basket. Boris groaned again. He never dreamt he would feel so guilty or miss Rachel and his children so much.

Bob Harefield, having endured Hermione’s hysterics, was now faced with the prospect of replacing Rannaldini, placating an enraged BBC and probably being lynched by a massive audience suffering from acute withdrawal symptoms. Oswaldo was in Moscow. Heinz the Swiss was on a plane to Rome. Bob was fed up with Rannaldini. There were other conductors he could have tried but he had always had a soft spot for Rachel and her husband.

Taking a deep breath, Bob dialled Chloe’s number.

‘Rannaldini’s got his whores crossed,’ he told Boris. ‘Do you want to conduct the Verdi Requiem tonight? I’m afraid there’s no time for a rehearsal.’

There was a long pause.

‘Yes, I will come. Thank you, Bob,’ said Boris, ‘but I ’ave no score, no car, no tailcoat. He is at dry cleaners. Chloe’s cat throw up on heem.’

‘I’m sending a car for you with the score in,’ said Bob, who knew Boris had been done for drink-driving and did not want to risk him getting lost, ‘and we’ll find you some tails. What size shirt are you?’

‘I look.’ Boris tugged the back of his collar round to the front. ‘Size sixteen. I thank you, Bob, from the beneath of my ’eart.’


36



Boris was too busy mugging up the score to feel really nervous until he saw the Albert Hall, enmeshed like Laccoon in the cables of the BBC television vans, and the vast crowds that had gathered without any hope of tickets just to get a glimpse of Harefield and Rannaldini arriving. Once in the conductor’s dressing room, he had great difficulty putting on the hired tails. When your hands are trembling frantically it is hard to get the studs through the starched shirt-front. He wished he could stiffen his upper lip accordingly. The white tie took even longer and was so white that his face and teeth looked yellow by comparison. He felt as if he were in a sauna and a straight-jacket already.

‘Need any help?’ Bob’s gleaming brown head came round the door.

‘Eef my hand shake this much when I get up there, we start prestissimo and the ’ole thing will be over een ten minutes,’ said Boris through chattering teeth, then blushing, ‘Is possible to let Rachel know?’

‘I rang her,’ said Bob. Then, thinking that at such a time white lies didn’t matter, ‘She sent her love and wished you luck.’

‘Her love, oh God, if I make a dick-up, what will she say, and how can I control Hermione?’

‘Hermione’s cried off,’ said Bob grimly.

Despite his uncharacteristically enraged accusations that she was being utterly unprofessional and bloody wet, his wife had refused to go on.

‘Christ! Who sing eenstead?’

‘I thought, fuck it — so I rang Cecilia.’

‘Omigod!’ Boris went even paler. ‘I control her even less. She raise skirt in middle of other soloists’ arias to distract audience.’

Bob laughed. ‘Tonight she’ll play ball. She’s got the perfect opportunity to upstage Rannaldini and Hermione. It’s me who’s going to end up out of a job and in the divorce courts.’

The shadows under Bob’s eyes were as deeply etched as bison horns in cave paintings. The poor guy really has put his head on the block, thought Boris.

It was a stiflingly hot evening. Ladies with fans ruffled the fringes of those beside them. The London Met were tuning up like birds in a wood. Microphones hung like spiders tossed out of a window. In the dress circle, stalls and red-curtained gold boxes, people chattered away excitedly in a score of different languages. The promenade area was overflowing, mostly with young men with beards and their girlfriends, bright eyed and rosy cheeked like younger sisters in Chekhov. Many of them held up RANNALDINI RULES OK and WE LOVE HERMIONE banners. Paper darts were sailing through the air. The BBC had threatened to cancel. Richard Baker, who was covering the prom for television, and Peter Barker, for the radio, were frantically rewriting their scripts, as Bob mounted the rostrum and dropped the bombshell that both Rannaldini and Hermione would not be appearing.

With the storm of protest that broke over his head, it was a minute before he could announce that their places would be taken by Boris Levitsky, a young Russian composer and conductor, very well known in his own country, and by one of the greatest divas in the world, Cecilia Rannaldini.

‘So at least,’ Bob shouted over the uproar, ‘you needn’t fold up your Rannaldini banners.’

The audience glared at him stonily and started to boo and catcall. Some of them had flown thousands of miles and threatened to demand their money back. Others walked out in noisy disgust.

‘I ’ate them,’ muttered Boris, waiting to go on.

‘They’ll hate themselves even more when they realize what they’ve missed,’ said Bob, combing Boris’s tangled pony-tail at the back, his calm exterior belying panic within. What if Boris really couldn’t cope? The Requiem was one of the most complex and demanding pieces of music. The chorus, sitting up against their crimson curtains, slumped in disgust. All the young sopranos and altos had been to the hairdressers and bought new black dresses. They might never get another chance to sing, or whatever, under the great Rannaldini.

‘O day of wrath, O day of calamity,’ sang the front-desk cellist who’d nearly lost his Strad in Rannaldini’s flat the day before. ‘Bob’ll get lynched if Boris cocks it up.’

‘Boris is a good boy,’ said his neighbour, opening the score they were sharing.

‘And virtually inexperienced in public.’

‘We’ll be OK as long as we don’t look up.’

Larry Lockton was so enraged he had to rush to the bar for a quadruple whisky. In anticipation of massive popular demand, Catchitune had just put on a huge re-press of Harefield’s and Rannaldini’s legendary 1986 version.

‘The only thing that fucker can be relied on to do is to let one down. We’re leaving at the interval.’

‘There isn’t an interval,’ said Marigold, consulting her programme. ‘They keep going for ninety minutes without a break. Poor Boris. I wonder what’s happened to Hermione and Rannaldini.’

‘I hope it’s something serious,’ snarled Larry.

It was bang on seven-thirty. Boris tried to keep still, take deep breaths and make his mind a blank, but the butterflies inside him had turned into wild geese flapping around.

‘Good luck,’ said Bob. ‘And may God go with you,’ he whispered.

The promenaders scrambled to their feet. Boris fell up the stairs as he and the four soloists came on and had to be picked up by Monalisa Wilson, enormous and resplendent in flame-red chiffon.