Score!

Before her first recording Flora spent the night with Abby and Viking, who had practically to drug and drag her screaming into his car to get her to Wallsend Town Hall, which had grown even colder, the icicles outside even longer. The red-nosed chorus, in their overcoats, looked like carol singers.

Flora was supposed to take over where Rozzy had not started: in the Forest of Fontainebleau with Hermione and Baby, but as a dreadful anticlimax, Hermione had just rung in for the second day running saying that the broken toe she’d sustained in her collision with Alpheus was much worse.

Tristan was so angry for Flora that he drove much too fast over icy roads back into London to the Lanesborough. Thundering on the door of Hermione’s suite he was admitted by her excited PA. Hearing shrieks of agony, he thought he had misjudged his leading lady, but barging into her bedroom, found her having her legs waxed. To Hermione’s fury, he immediately insisted she and one hairy leg return with him to Wallsend.

Flora, meanwhile, had been immensely comforted to find a good-luck card in her dressing room from Serena’s new PA, Rozzy Pringle. She was attempting to get her trembling lips round a few arpeggios, when Rozzy herself rushed in with a mug of hot Ribena.

‘Hello, my poor lamb, you mustn’t be frightened. You’ve got such a lovely voice. I’ve studied the role so if you need any help… I have to confess,’ Rozzy went on, as she hung Flora’s blue scarf on a hanger, ‘I was prepared to hate you because my husband, Glyn, is so in love with your mother, he’s got all her records.’

‘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.