‘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.
‘I’m glad mega-Stalin is indisposed,’ she murmured to Boris. ‘He frightens the life out of me.’
Reluctant laughter swept the hall as she brushed the dust off his knees in a motherly fashion and straightened his tie.
‘We show eem, we do better wizout him,’ whispered Cecilia, who looked stunning, but more suited to sing in a night-club in clinging gold sequins. The boy’s very attractive, she thought, and comparatively untouched by human hand.
The biggest audience ever squeezed into the Albert Hall were bitterly disappointed, but they saw Boris’s deathly pallor and his youth and some of the cognoscenti remembered his defection from Russia. Goodwill began to trickle back.
Standing on the rostrum, all Boris could see below the soaring organ pipes were rows and rows of men and women dressed in black — as if for his funeral. He saw the pearly skins of the drums and the gleaming brass who would play such a big part in the next ninety minutes. The bows of the string section were poised above their instruments.
Boris looked at them all solemnly and searchingly. The notes of the score seemed to swim before his eyes — 278 pages of decision making and complexity. Bending his dark head he kissed the first page and with a totally steady hand gave the upbeat. The whispering nightingales of the ‘Kyrie eleison’ can seldom have been slower or more hushed. Alas, some gunman took off down Kensington Gore after a shoot-out and soon a convoy of police cars, sirens wailing sforzando and hurtling after him, could all be heard within the hall, destroying the mood of veneration and snapping Boris’s concentration.
The first deafening crashes of the ‘Dies Irae’ were very ragged. Every hair of Boris’s black glossy head was drenched in sweat. The audience were beginning to exchange pained glances. Twice he lost his place, pages fluttering like a trapped butterfly, but like kindly trusty old Arthur with a nervous young rider, the London Met carried him until he found it again.