Errant Angels (9 page)

‘I am very sorry that I am a few minutes late,' said a deep, well-focussed voice behind her. The sudden pronouncement made her start with surprise. ‘And I apologize a second time for making you jump,' continued the voice, as its owner crossed to the piano. He deposited the pile of papers he was carrying onto its closed lid. On the top of the pile was a folded copy of that morning's
Daily Telegraph –
Thursday 15th June 1939.

‘That's all right,' replied Penelope, turning around as she
regained her composure. What she saw took her breath away. For a moment, she thought that Rudolf Valentino or Douglas Fairbanks had entered the room.

‘Firstly, I must thank you for coming to see me after a tiring day of study. I must also assume that my request has been favourably received by the powers that be in this place and that they have sent me one of their most outstanding pianists as a result. Please, do sit down,' he said, indicating a chair in the front row.

‘Oh … thank you,' she said, settling onto the indicated chair and dropping two of her books in the process.

‘Allow me,' he said gallantly, bending down to retrieve them for her. ‘Chopin and Bach. What a good combination. One for the heart and one for the brain, would you not agree? I'll leave you to decide which is which.'

He smiled and revealed even, white teeth, which seemed to glow like lights against the olive tan of his skin. Penelope Strachan's head was spinning as she suffered the onset of juvenile infatuation. The man must have been a good fifteen years older than she was and he was absolutely charming.

‘I have been asked to come to your room, Professor, because I was told that you wished me to play for you.' She smiled embarrassedly and felt a little stupid for having told him what he obviously already knew.

‘Indeed, you did … and I do,' he continued, smiling. His command of English was excellent, even if there was the slightest deeply buried hint of a foreign accent. She thought that was proof that this man was a foreigner – with the name of Professor Giacomo Capezzani-Batelli, he could hardly have been anything else. She giggled softly at her own silliness, as if to hide her embarrassment.

‘Is that such an amusing thing to request?' he asked, still smiling.

‘Not at all; I was just trying to match Chopin to the heart
and Bach to the brain. Wouldn't you agree?' she asked as her giggles turned into a smile almost as broad as his.

‘Most certainly I would. But when it comes to the deepest emotions of the heart, there is nothing to beat the music of Verdi or the great Puccini. What skill they both had in being able to play with their characters' emotions right in front of your very eyes and your ears. Do you know their work at all? Very often, pianists do not have the opportunity to … shall we say
stray
beyond the considerable limits of their own extensive repertoire.' The statement was without prejudice and was simply a revelation of what he had found to be the truth over his years of coaching singers, who were accompanied by pianists more at home with the piano repertoire than with the operatic one.

‘My parents took me to see
La Traviata
at the Royal Opera House a couple of seasons ago and I have also been to Glyndebourne, to hear Mozart. I am not sure if I have ever heard a Puccini opera. My father is very fond of the sextet from
Lucia di Lammermoor
. I made a piano reduction of it for his birthday earlier this year… I didn't write it down or anything… I just play it from the score…'

‘You have the score for
Lucia?'
he asked, impressed. Scores were expensive things to buy.

‘Yes. I also have
Le Nozze di Figaro
,' she continued, pronouncing the name of Mozart's masterpiece in rather quixotic Italian.

‘Ah ha …
si parla Italiano, Signorina
?
Sono impressionato che si prova
.'

Penelope Strachan sat perfectly still, the smile still on her face. She looked as if she had been caught in the headlights of an oncoming car.

‘Do you speak Italian?' repeated the professor softly, encouragingly.

‘Oh … I see,' she replied, giggling. ‘Goodness me, no … not at all, I'm afraid.'

‘Then that does not matter. I will teach you as we work through the great works of the operatic repertoire. Would you like a little coffee?' he asked, suddenly changing the subject. ‘I have my own Thermos flask and bring some in with me every day. I have just enough left for a small cup each.'

‘Er … yes … thank you, Professor. That would be very nice.'

‘Excellent! Then I will pour it for us in the twinkling of an eye.' He got up and crossed to the filing cabinet. Then he bent down, opened the bottom drawer, removed his flask and stood up again, closing the drawer as he did so. ‘There are those who might think that such a useful storage place is full of reports, forms, music, scores and all of the other paperwork associated with working in an academy as august as this one. But there are often far more important things to find a hiding place for, like a good cup of coffee, for instance,' he laughed as he regained his chair.

For Penelope Strachan, that cup of coffee was to create an enduring memory. They continued in polite conversation, the Professor outlining her duties as accompanist for his numerous master classes and at the individual lessons of his more outstanding students.

‘I play myself, of course, but I find having my concentration divided between the voice and the keyboard is not that conducive to a successful lesson. It is far better to rely on the skills of someone as competent as you.'

He smiled warmly once again and she felt herself sinking even further down into the impenetrably hard surface of the chair.

13

Julietta Camore felt herself to be very much the second fiddle of the two sopranos in COGOL. As a result, despite superficial pleasantries, she had become somewhat of an arch-rival to Renata di Senno. In fact, rivalry was not a concept of Julietta's life that was confined solely to her participation in COGOL; she maintained further rivalry with her sister. As is often usual between family members, a routine of telephone calls ‘just to catch up' had evolved and over time had become almost a chore that was neither looked forward to, nor relished during the transmission of the call. It being Sunday morning, she found herself sitting at the kitchen table with a steaming cup of frothy
cappuccino
in front of her and the kitchen timer ticking silently away next to it; she had recently taken to timing and thereby limiting the weekly telephone calls with her sister.

‘…but of course,
cara
, we have the villa for two weeks,' cooed Mirella down the line from distant Rome. ‘It's Libero's place down on the Amalfi Coast. They're off to some festival or other in Switzerland and then they plan to do Vienna and then Paris. You know how opera-mad they are – a little like you.'

Julietta had never actually met Libero and his family although, lately, as Mirella had spent so much of her time talking about them, Julietta felt that she had. On reflection, she didn't really want to meet the Libero clan anyway. They sounded as flash and gauche as her sister had become. Listening to the weekly dose of what her beloved
sister had done was just about all Julietta could cope with.

‘Oh well,' continued Mirella indifferently, ‘there's plenty of room; why don't you and Fabio come down for a couple of days? You're probably not doing anything, are you?'

There was more than a suggestion of mockery in her sister's voice. Ever since they had been young children, Mirella had always been the one to have the better opinion of her own worth, often to the detriment of her sister's self-confidence. This attitude seemed to have been amplified by their father, who almost always made his preference for his firstborn perfectly obvious, albeit in a not unkind way – or so it had seemed to Julietta at the time. Now, despite having charted a path through life that had seen her become a capable hand at many things, and yet never a master hand at any single one, Julietta Camore had increasingly begun to feel the weight of insecurity tighten its insidious grip on her. She glanced at the timer – four and a half minutes so far – then swallowed a mouthful of
cappuccino
before returning her concentration to her sister's tedious conversation.

‘I have a concert to sing,' she replied, ‘and Fabio is very busy with the business,' she continued, replacing the cup in its saucer. ‘He has a new client, a company from Bologna who want him to re-invent their Internet presence, so he will be busy with that contract for the next couple of months. Then, he's had another enqui –'

‘I suppose the concert is with that little opera group you belong to? Still going, is it? I must try to get up to Lucca one day and hear you all.'

Julietta flushed at the barely hidden provocation in her sister's voice. There had been a time when she had given Mirella the benefit of the doubt and had put such remarks down to her sister's clumsy way of expressing her thoughts. After many years, however, she had now made a different and less generous assessment of her relationship with her only sister. She knew perfectly well that Mirella had
absolutely no intention of making the trip to Lucca to hear her sing. Mirella had never put herself out for anybody or for anything, unless Mirella benefited directly from that action. She had not changed.

‘Yes, but we are not just a “little opera group”, as you put it. We are the Chamber Opera Group of Lucca.' Julietta spoke with some force and then, in response to the conditioning of years, immediately regretted having given her sister a possible excuse to retaliate. Mirella was far better at handling such situations, which only made Julietta feel even more insecure and in the shadows.

‘And I'm sure that you are all very good,' Mirella replied in her irritating, almost dismissive way, ‘and Aldo sends you his regards,' she added, almost as an afterthought. ‘Did I tell you that he will be in Abu Dhabi for a week? Bank business, you know. He said that I should join him. The shopping is very good out there – gold and diamonds, that sort of thing. Aldo said that he would buy me something nice if I was there so that I could try it on and see if it suited. He's such an angel … just like your Fabio.'

There was another pause, during which Julietta took another mouthful of
cappuccino
. Six minutes twenty seconds. Then she gritted her teeth against her sister's none-too-subtle dig at the fact that her husband Fabio's income was simply not in the same league as Aldo's and banged the cup back into its saucer. Was it
that
hard to think up an excuse to avoid having to sit and listen to her sister's endless opinions of her own self-importance? It had always been ‘Aldo sends you his
regards
' and never ‘Aldo sends you his
love
'. Julietta liked her sister's husband and, on the occasional holiday when they had all managed to get together, they had all got along extremely well. In fact, Julietta harboured many affectionate memories of just how well she and Aldo had passed their time together. They were memories which, of necessity, she had been extremely
careful to keep to herself, as they were of an intimate nature. Julietta sometimes wondered if her sister had a suspicion or two. That would be one explanation for why Mirella's passed-on greetings were always so formal. Julietta often wondered what the revelation of these secrets would do to her sister's control over Aldo; she reasoned that it would be weakened if she passed on what she really felt for her brother-in-law. She had always seen Mirella as a person who insisted on being in control of the situation and of the people around her.

‘I had better go now,' said Julietta, a little lamely. ‘I have some practising to do; I am working on my favourite aria “
O don fatale
” from Verdi's
Don Ca…
'

‘Aldo is taking me out to dinner tonight … that new restaurant in
Piazza Cavour
,' Mirella cut in abruptly. ‘It's
very
exclusive and
very
expensive. Their speciality is something to kill for, so I'm told. They start by lightly braising veal in…'

Julietta had stopped listening to the endless ramble of one expensive delight after another and emptied the remains of her
cappuccino
. She didn't know anything about any of the restaurants where her sister lived. It irritated her that Mirella should even think that she did. Perhaps that was not the important point; perhaps what her sister wanted her to pay attention to was the drawn-out word ‘very' and the emphasized word ‘expensive'.

‘So I must go now. Speak to you soon,' Julietta interrupted, ‘and give love … from both of us … to Aldo.' She knew that that was one message that would not be passed on; at least not in the form she had given it. Sometimes she really despised her sister.

‘Have a good concert then,
cara
… Sing like an angel…
Ciao
,' replied Mirella emptily.

Julietta was about to hang up when she heard her sister's voice shouting through the tiny earpiece of the telephone.
She put it back to her ear. Eight minutes forty-three seconds. ‘Yes, I'm still here,' she said with a sigh.
Why doesn't she just hang up?
‘Yes, what is it? I'm still here.'

‘What with all our goings-on at this end, I almost forgot to tell you something important,' Mirella continued.

If you could just develop the idea that there are other people on this earth besides yourself, you might well become aware of the lives of others
, thought Julietta, realising, predictably, that her sister would not allow
her
to be the one to end the conversation.

‘
Cara
… I have some exciting news for you,' continued Mirella. ‘Do you remember my friend Carlotta?'

There was an expectant pause, during which it felt as if Mirella was waiting for her sister to say that she did. Julietta vaguely remembered someone called Carlotta, but she couldn't place her. Mirella's list of ‘friends' would half fill the Rome telephone directory, so it was quite possible that Carlotta had been mentioned on a previous occasion.

‘I think so,' answered Julietta lamely. She had become more tired than usual with this particular conversation and had started to bitterly regret not having allowed gravity to finish its work and draw the handset safely back to its cradle.

‘Well, Carlotta's cousin has a son going up to university in Pisa. Very bright … He's going to study aeronautical engineering … or was it physics?'

Julietta couldn't have cared less if he were to study the menu outside his local
pizzeria
. ‘I'm very pleased for him, but I really must go now. I have practising to do.'

‘But,
cara
, you don't understand. He has a voice … such a beautiful voice. In fact, there was some debate in his family as to whether he should study music or one of the sciences. Anyway, I happened to mention your little singing group to him and his mother and she was very keen for him to join
you. Lucca isn't
that
far from Pisa is it?'

Julietta immediately sensed Mirella's interfering hand. She had refrained from voicing her opinion and had been about to tell her sister that the journey was only twenty minutes, but she got no further than an intake of breath.

‘So I've given him your telephone number and he said that he'll be phoning you, once he's settled in at the university. So, what do you think of that?'

Julietta had not thought much of it at all. She was used to her sister's grandiose schemes and the way she thought that everything she organized would be met by all and sundry with unbridled gratitude. She resisted any inclination to answer. Nine minutes and five seconds.

‘I had better go now,
cara
, I have an “eleven o'clock” at the health spa with Ferruccio. Did I tell you about my personal trainer? He's quite something.'

That was the first that Julietta had heard of Ferruccio, but she seized the opportunity to escape from the irritation of the telephone call. ‘Of course you did,' she lied, cutting across her sister, ‘and I hope you have a good work out, but now I really must go.' She had no idea what it was that prompted her next question. ‘What is this singing angel's name?'

‘Er … Ruggiero,' Mirella replied, momentarily knocked off course by the sudden interruption to her train of thought. She seemed to hesitate, presumably as the athletic shape of Ferruccio dissolved in her mind's eye. ‘Ruggiero Mondini… He said that he'll call you.'

‘Fine, now I must go. Enjoy your gym.
Ciao
,
ciao
,' Julietta repeated as the receiver descended to the welcoming grasp of its cradle. She had only just made her self-imposed limit of no more than ten minutes for a single call with her sister and sat looking at the telephone. On the table in front of her the empty
cappuccino
cup that had long since said farewell to the last lingering wisps of steam, stood as a
record of the time spent speaking to her sister. She reached out and switched off the kitchen timer, got up and carried the cold cup over to the dishwasher. She would immerse herself in her scores and put in a good hour of concentrated practice. As far as she was concerned, at least
her
existence had a purpose in it, even if, in her opinion, that of her beloved sister did not.

Walking into her music room, she picked up her diary from the top of the piano, opened it to one of the pages reserved for making notes and wrote down the name of Ruggiero Mondini. She would tell the Contessa about this young man with the outstanding voice, but only if the singing angel ever actually telephoned her from Pisa.