‘I’ll get him an advance copy of her next album,’ promised Flora. ‘We’re all huge fans of yours.’
‘Come and meet Granville Hastings,’ said Rozzy. ‘He’s such a darling.’
‘Why are there so many people here?’ muttered an aghast Flora.
‘You’ve turned up on the worst possible day,’ whispered back Rozzy indignantly. ‘By constantly ignoring poor Tristan’s schedule and pulling out people to sing as and when he felt like it, Rannaldini’s created the most appalling backlog. All the rest of the cast are here in case they have to do retakes. Poor Tristan!’
They found Granny regaling an audience with chitchat.
‘My dear child, welcome.’ He put down his knitting to give Flora a kiss.
‘Where the hell’s Rannaldini?’ Even the normally ebullient Baby was uptight over all the hanging around.
‘Having a poke, I expect,’ sighed Granny. ‘He always poked the prettiest chorus girls at the Garden, bending them over the red velvet balcony of the royal box between rehearsals. If anyone came by, he used to pretend he was showing them round the opera-house.’
Granny rose, still knitting, and went into a sequence of languid pelvic thrusts. ‘Down there ees the peet, where my orchestra play [thrust], and zat is rostrum where I perform miracle [thrust], and zat is proscenium arch [thrust].’
‘When you ’ave feenish, Granville,’ said a chilling voice.
The laughter died. Granny dropped several stitches.
‘Dame ’Ermione soldier in. At least ’ave the courtesy not to keep her waiting.’ Rannaldini glared round.
‘Anyone got a Fisherman’s Friend?’ came Hermione’s pathetic bleat.
Limping ostentatiously, she joined Baby and Flora on the platform.
‘Just like the Teddy Bears’ Picnic,’ hissed Flora, glaring at Hermione’s full-length mink.
‘I assure you, this will be no picnic,’ hissed back Baby.
Rannaldini just had to stand there. His cruel, cold, pale, malevolent face was enough to give a performance its special edge. He raised his stick. Viking’s dying horn call floated out of the bar.
Flora was so terrified she began loud and sharp. It didn’t take Rannaldini long to put the boot in. After the fifth take, when she’d finally got the notes right, he said, ‘That was better, Flora, but you are expected to act.’
Flora flushed. ‘But I thought—’
‘Don’t,’ said Rannaldini crushingly. ‘You do not have the necessary equipment,’ he added bitchily. ‘To be a singer you have to have a voice. To be a musician you have to have a brain. Don’t confuse the two.’
There is a limited number of times you can ask a singer to repeat herself and get the words, notes and acting right. Rannaldini exceeded it. Flora was also slimming, and the rare perfect take was invariably wrecked by her rumbling tummy.
‘This is hopeless,’ yelled Rannaldini, calling a lunch break. ‘We will finish scene tomorrow.’
The last day was even more tempestuous, particularly when George Hungerford rolled up with Trevor, Flora’s terrier, and sat at the back of the hall scowling at Rannaldini. Flora got even more flustered, particularly when Trevor started howling at Hermione’s rather dubious top notes, which reduced both chorus and cast to fits of laughter, so master and dog were banished from the hall.
‘That nasty little dog is, alas, a critic,’ said Serena, as she picked up the telephone in the control room to ring Rannaldini on the rostrum. ‘Dame Hermione has lost her top.’
‘Where? Where?’ said Sexton, looking round the control room in excitement.
‘Her top notes, you bloody idiot.’ Serena slammed down the receiver.
Rannaldini decided to take a break and listen to the playback. Tristan bore George off for ‘a cup of tea and a piece of shortbread for Trevor’.
Smarmy frog even knows the name of my dog, thought George ungratefully.
‘And then you can sit in the control room,’ added Tristan.
‘No, he can’t,’ snapped Serena, who’d nipped down to the canteen to grab a cup of tea, and who hadn’t forgiven George for choosing to live with Flora rather than her. ‘Our singers’ weaknesses and how we conceal them are entirely our secret.’
‘Weaknesses?’ squawked Hermione, who, having clocked Rannaldini’s preference for Serena, had been spoiling for a fight. ‘What weaknesses? How dare you, you patronizing hussy?’ Grabbing cups and saucers, she started smashing them on the floor.
‘Pull yourself together, Hermione,’ said Serena bossily. ‘My little Jessie wouldn’t behave like that.’
Appearing in the doorway, Rannaldini ducked to avoid a milk jug and frogmarched a screaming Hermione off to her dressing room. Three minutes later, he came out zipping up his flies.
‘She’ll be OK now.’
‘But we’re going to have to drop in someone else’s top notes,’ whispered Serena.
Tristan decided to placate George with a large whisky instead and bore him off to find one.
‘Flora is wonderful,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘She is determined not to betray her panic to Elisabetta, but listen to the tension in her voice.’
‘She’s not having to act,’ snarled George, ‘and who’s that damn sight too good-looking boy playing Carlos?’
‘Baby Spinosissimo. He’s sublime, but extremely gay.’
The ladies of the chorus, who were not needed in the finale, were drifting away. Pushy’s hard little heart was breaking as she knocked on Rannaldini’s door.
‘Ay’ve just come to say goodbay, Maystro.’
‘My dear, can you keep a secret on pain of death?’
‘Of course,’ lied Pushy, wriggling inside.
‘How would you like to sing Dame Hermione’s top notes?’
At last the recording was over. Tristan heaved a sigh of relief that Rannaldini would now whizz off round the world out of their hair, allowing himself, Serena and Sylvestre to get on with the editing.
But, to his horror, Rannaldini went nowhere, hogging the edit suite, putting his stamp on everything, causing endless rows over which take was used, twiddling knobs so some singers sounded less good and others better than they had at the recording. Granny, getting to the end of his career, needed careful editing. Hermione, as Rannaldini’s mistress and more importantly because of their mutual record sales, couldn’t sound less than perfect. Sylvestre dropped in Pushy’s top notes so no-one could detect the join.
Still disappointed that Tristan hadn’t made a move, Serena put it down to the fact that she had supported Rannaldini on every artistic decision. She had also, reluctantly, become very smitten with her Italian stallion. It was so sweet of Rannaldini on the last day of editing, because her involvement in the film was ended, to invite her, Sylvestre and Tristan back to his flat overlooking Hyde Park for a farewell dinner.
As Serena was leaving to relieve the babysitter, because it was Nanny Bratislava’s night off, she handed Rannaldini a picture her daughter Jessie had painted specially for her ‘Uncle Roberto’.
‘How charming of Jessie,’ Rannaldini wiped away a tear, and as he ushered Serena into her minicab, promised he would call her later.
Bounding back into the house, however, he rolled up Jessie’s picture, plunged it into the drawing-room fire and lit his cigar with it.
‘What are you doing?’ demanded Tristan in horror.
‘Now the recording is sewn up,’ Rannaldini inhaled happily, ‘I have no more need to ingratiate myself with little Jessie’s mother.’
There were more fireworks in March when members of the cast were issued with cassettes of themselves singing so they could learn the words to which they had to mime on location and time their movements to them. Then they discovered how much Rannaldini had doctored the recording. Chloe was incensed by the cuts in the ‘Veil Song’ and in ‘Don Fatale’.