‘Far, far worse,’ Abby snapped. ‘Like losing a thousand babies. Every time I played a concert, I gave birth.’
Rupert was appalled by her appearance. A forelock of dark hair fell damp and flat to her eyebrows. Her fleshless face was dominated more than ever by the haunted, heavily shadowed yellow eyes. The only plumpness left was in the curve of her lower lip. She had lost twenty pounds. Seeing her huddled, wide-shouldered, long-legged body, Rupert was reminded of some shell-shocked youth fatally wounded in the trenches.
Getting out his fountain-pen, he drew a blue cross on the inside of her right wrist just where it joined her hand.
‘This is the place if you want to top yourself properly. You did it too far up the arm, just means the nerves take longer to grow back.’
‘Will they?’
‘Course they will. I had no feeling for six months after I trapped a nerve at the LA Olympics; Ricky France-Lynch’s arm took nearly three years; my son-in-law Luke’s hand was pulverized by a polo ball. We all got better.’
He had brought her a bunch of lilies of the valley, and a little silver replica of a head of garlic.
‘That’s to ward off evil, you’re to keep it beside you all the time. Taggie’s also made you a tin of fudge. She sent love and said she was dreadfully sorry.’
‘Thanks,’ said Abby listlessly. ‘Did you get your baby?’
‘We got two, Xavier and Bianca. Flew them home last week. The grooms had hung a welcome home banner across the gate and balloons all up the drive. Edith Spink brought the Cotchester Chamber Orchestra over in a bus to play “Congratulations”. All the dogs had bows, it was great. Xavier couldn’t believe his eyes. He’s walking all over the place now. And his first word was Daddy, so he’s obviously going to be a diplomat.’
Rupert gave a big yawn.
‘Sorry, we’re not getting much sleep at the moment. Bianca’s routine’s all out of sync.’
His tearing spirits made Abby feel even more dreadful, particularly as they kept being interrupted by nurses popping in to check Abby’s fingers for gangrene and gaze at Rupert.
‘They never allow me a second to brood,’ groaned Abby. ‘And oh God, the counsellor’s due at three o’clock.’
‘Don’t believe in that crap,’ said Rupert. ‘Only person who can sort you out is yourself. Counsellors are flooding into Penscombe at the moment. There’s a ghastly beard with an Adam’s apple who’s got a crush on Taggie and keeps forecasting disaster because we’ve adopted a black child. He asked me yesterday whether I was going to teach Xav the customs of his country? Did he want me to give Xav a line of coke for breakfast, I said.’
But Abby wasn’t listening, being too wrapped up in her own tragedy.
‘I can’t do Declan’s programme now,’ she said sulkily, ‘if that’s what you’ve come for.’
Rupert’s face softened.
‘I came to see you, because I was dead worried and because I like you a lot. Classical music bores the tits off me, reminds me of my first wife, but you made it as exciting,’ Rupert cast round, ‘as a good Gold Cup.’
Abby started to cry. Rupert took her in his arms.
For a second, Abby clung to him enjoying the muscular warmth, then, as the counsellor came in, she screamed with rage: ‘Is there no peace except beyond the grave?’
‘Don’t talk like that,’ chided the counsellor. ‘She’s doing great,’ she added to Rupert.
‘I must go,’ Rupert got to his feet. ‘The only answer,’ he ruffled Abby’s hair, ‘is to become a conductor. That shit Rannaldini needs some competition.’
Shepherd Denston, who were in turmoil, were fast coming to the same conclusion.
‘If only Abby’d done the job properly,’ grumbled Howard on a conference call to Christopher and young Howie in London, ‘she could have become a cult figure like James Dean or Marilyn Monroe.’
‘Not enough mileage,’ said young Howie. ‘She’s better alive. We gotta find something for her to do.’
Shepherd Denston needed the money. It was not just the houses on Long Island and the old masters and young mistresses, acquired on the expectation of Abby’s massive income. The agency had also extended themselves dangerously, backing concerts throughout Eastern Europe, only to find the newly free populations were hungrier for new cars than culture.
‘What a pity that contract with Rannaldini never got signed,’ said Howard.
‘We better get her Strad back,’ said Christopher briskly. ‘Can’t let it lie idle. Maria needs a decent instrument.’
Maria Kusak was Abby’s bitterest rival, one of the agency’s rising stars.
‘Fact that Abby’s pulled through suicide, like coming off drugs, or cracking anorexia, is gonna evoke public sympathy,’ said Howie, then groaned as his secretary handed him a fax saying that Benny Basanovich had been so drunk in Munich he’d skipped pages of Prokofiev’s Third Concerto before falling off the piano-stool.
‘The only answer,’ said Howard, ‘is for her to learn to conduct, while we see if her hand’s gonna recover.’
For now though, Abby must leave the limelight until the scandal had died down. Sir Rodney Macintosh, who’d said some uncomfortingly sharp things to Christopher after the accident, gallantly came to the rescue, and offered Abby the use of his house on Lake Lucerne.
‘The wild flowers are out of this world, darling, and the mountain air is purer arid more exhilarating than Krug.’
Rodney’s ancient housekeeper, Gisela, who was used to temperamental artists, would build up Abby’s strength. There was every score in the world to work on. She could have a resident physio and a succession of student conductors to teach her the rudiments.
Christopher, everyone decided, must bow out of Abby’s life. Another reason why Lucerne was a good idea. Her career, in future, would be handled by the London office and, when he wasn’t racing all over Europe to sort out the chaos caused by Benny Basanovich, by Howie Denston.
EIGHT
Clutching her silver clove of garlic, Abby arrived in Lucerne. Rodney met her and, with a series of loud bangs, singing: ‘All boys are cheap today, cheaper than yesterday,’ to the tune of ‘La Donna e mobile’, drove her out to his house along the lake.
Known as Flasher’s Folly, it stood on the town side of a wooded peninsula, which seemed to crawl into the lake like a huge furry caterpillar. The house itself was square, black gabled, with a mossy red roof and warm yellow walls smothered in white wisteria. The oak front door was thirty yards from the water’s edge. Behind the house was a lawn flanked by honeysuckle, rose colonnades and a water garden fed by two springs. Separating the garden from the mountains was an orchard and a copse of linden trees. Rodney’s fourth wife, the one who’d played concertos in her nightie, had plainly been a wonderful gardener.
‘We’ve had some great parties over the years,’ Rodney squeezed Abby’s shoulder. ‘In heatwaves we often bathed starkers in the lake at midnight.’
The entire attic was set aside for Rodney’s train sets. He could run ten trains simultaneously along the tracks without any crashes.
‘The secret of conducting is to be able to do ten things at once.’
Abby’s big bedroom took up most of the second floor and had windows front and back. As well as a four-poster with sprigged white-and-yellow muslin curtains, it contained a piano, a record player, bookshelves packed with every score from Purcell to Gorecki, a stuffed bear wearing a Victorian bishop’s mitre and, among other pictures on the pale Parma-violet walls, a portrait of Rodney’s second cousin, Myrtle, who’d become a missionary.