After a month off, the orchestra were very rusty, fingers and lips couldn’t be trusted. Effing and blinding under their breath they began ploughing through the ‘Dies Irae’. Jerry the Joker played ‘God Save the Queen’ on his bassoon to see if Abby noticed.

‘I heard you, get out, Jerry,’ she shouted. ‘As a section leader you’re supposed to set a good example.’

‘What a frightful piece of music this is,’ sighed Dixie.

‘Cheer up,’ said Jerry, going out grinning and licking doughnut sugar off his fingers. ‘You’ll only have to play it once.’

‘We’re recording it,’ Abby, who was battling for at least four performances as well, yelled after him. ‘But not till the middle of October to give you the time to digest the complexities.’

‘And puke them all up again,’ called out Randy.

Abby tried another tack.

‘You’ve got to familiarize yourself with it to love it,’ she pleaded. ‘In 1915, when they first rehearsed Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite-’

The orchestra raised their eyes to heaven and started to yawn ostentatiously.

‘Scythian Suite,’ persisted Abby, ‘one of the cellists said to the conductor: “Just because I have a wife who is sick and three kids to support, why must I be forced to endure such hell?” Musicians have always resisted innovation, if you know what I mean.’

‘That’s the trouble,’ said Carmine rudely, ‘none of us know what you do mean.’

‘Musicians don’t want to be lectured,’ said Davie Buckle, starting another game of patience on top of his drums. ‘They want to play the concert, then go out, get pissed and have a curry.’

The orchestra fell about.

It was time for Cathie to play ‘Rachel’s Lament’ for the first time, initially just as an extended echo in the ‘Lachrymosa’, then leading up to the long final solo in the ‘Libera Me’.

Surely they must realize how beautiful it is, prayed Abby. But Cathie was so nervous, so exhausted at the end of the school holidays, and so conscious of Carmine’s angry little red brake-light eyes boring into her, that she made a complete hash of it.

‘Gee, you screwed up on that one,’ said Abby in disappointment after the third botched attempt and leapt down to talk to Cathie. If she fluffed the “Lachrymosa” how the hell was she going to cope with the “Libera Me”.

‘I thought Boris was giving the big solo to Viking,’ whispered Dixie.

‘Boris has changed his total lack of tune,’ whispered back Randy. ‘Evidently Boris is knocking off his au pair and Viking’s nicked her, but only after Viking caught Boris in flagrante with-’ a wicked smile spread over Randy’s face, as he lowered his voice even more.

‘You gotta be joking,’ Dixie looked at Abby, his eyes on stalks. Then, immediately turning to his Second Trombone, ‘Did you know that Boris is bonking-’

Soon the story was whizzing around the orchestra, like starlings alighting on different trees at dusk.

‘What are you reading, Flawless?’ asked Viking.

‘“Sohrab and Rustram”,’ snapped Flora, who hadn’t forgiven Viking. ‘It’s about much more heroic men than you lot.’

‘Someone should write a poem called “So Bad on Rostrum”.’

‘That’s not funny, if you hadn’t jumped on Astrid, you’d be playing that solo.’

As they struggled for another ten minutes, Abby felt utterly superfluous, the orchestra were far too busy sight-reading to look at her.

‘Where the fuck are we?’ Viking asked Blue, as resounding crashes, twangs and shrieks rent the air.

‘Two bars to go. I’ll bring you in-’

Abby called a halt. ‘That was terrible.’

‘It would help if you beat a little more clearly,’ called out Juno.

Abby ignored her.

‘The next bit is really sad,’ Abby attempted a weak joke. ‘Could you play it, I guess, as Lionel looks?’

Lionel was furious. Confronted by a series of glissandos and teeth-gritting shrieks achieved by drawing the side of the bow down the strings, he pretended to cry.

‘I cannot bear it,’ he said, putting his head carefully in his hands so as not to disturb the lustrous blow-dried waves. ‘My string players have dedicated their lives to producing a beautiful sound-’

Abby raised an eyebrow.

‘And they are forced to make fools of themselves playing this junk.’

Lionel was acting up because over the page he had discovered the long solo Boris had deliberately made difficult for him, which was only accompanied by the basses. Compelled to tackle it, he pretended to be fooling around and deliberately making the most ghastly cock up.

‘You’re not trying,’ raged Abby, beyond any awareness that it was below the belt to bawl out a leader in front of his orchestra.

The RSO brightened at the prospect of a screaming match.

‘It’s unplayable,’ said Lionel flatly.

‘Don’t be such a goddamn wimp.’

‘You only say that, Maestro,’ furiously Hilary leapt to the defence of her beloved, ‘because there’s no way you could ever play it.’

Putting down the Selected Poems of Matthew Arnold, Flora said calmly, ‘Boris used to play the violin in an orchestra. He’s perfectly aware of its limitations and capabilities.’

‘You hold your tongue, young lady,’ said Hilary furiously.

‘It’s impossible, unplayable junk,’ intoned Lionel.

‘It is not,’ screamed Abby.

‘It fucking well is.’

‘Fucking isn’t.’ Jibbering with rage, Abby leapt from the rostrum, snatched Lionel’s fiddle and played the solo absolutely perfectly.

There was a stunned, stunned silence — long enough to play a Bruckner symphony. The musicians looked at Abby in amazement, but not in nearly as much amazement as Abby looked at Lionel’s violin. As she handed it back, Flora, roused out of her habitual cool, rushed forward, sending a music-stand and its music flying.

‘Oh Abby,’ she said in a choked voice. ‘Don’t you realize what this means? It’s come back, you can play again. Oh Abby.’

And the whole orchestra, except Lionel, Hilary, Juno and Carmine, stood up and cheered.

Abby looked utterly shell-shocked.

‘Thank you, everyone. That’s it for today; we’ll start with the Brahms Violin Concerto first thing after lunch tomorrow,’ she said, ending the rehearsal twenty minutes early and emerging from the dark inferno of Boris Levitsky into the sunshine.

Flora brought a couple of bottles of Muscadet back to Woodbine Cottage, and she and Abby celebrated with Marcus. Abby was still shell-shocked.

‘I cannot believe it, I’m sure it was a fluke. Did it really sound OK?’ she begged Flora over and over again.

‘Course it did,’ said Flora. ‘And that miraculous blood-curdling wonderful sound couldn’t have come from anyone else.’

‘Play something now,’ pleaded Marcus, picking up Abby’s coat and hanging it up in the hall, ‘just to convince yourself. I want to hear it, too.’

‘I daren’t, not yet. I don’t want to tempt providence and I don’t want any more to drink,’ Abby put her hand over her glass. ‘I gotta work.’

‘I don’t know why you bother,’ grumbled Flora, topping up her own glass, ‘after the way those pigs treat you. Just walk out and go back to reducing the whole world to orgasm on the violin. Come on, let’s get pissed.’

But Abby refused. Desperate to be alone, she disappeared to her room to mug up the Brahms concerto. It was the last piece she had done before she had cut her wrist. It would be unendurable not to be playing it tomorrow. Perhaps a miracle had happened and she could return to the violin, but she still hated giving up the RSO without a fight.

She couldn’t concentrate. Every note remembered was anguish. Throwing open her bedroom window, which looked on to the front garden, she disturbed a swarm of peacock butterflies gorging themselves on the buddleia. Was it proverbial vanity which made them match their rust-and-purple wings so perfectly to the pale purple flowers?

Thistledown floated through the air; the fields of stubble, platinum-blond in the morning sunshine, were now red-gold after the rain. The white trumpets of the convolvulus rioting along the hedgerow reminded her of her brass section. She could smell frying garlic and onions. Marcus must be cooking supper, banging pans after all that Muscadet. He had been so kind when Boris had humiliated her. She must find him work.

Then everything was forgotten as through the dusk she heard Viking, the ultimate peacock, practising, idling around with ‘Rachel’s Lament’, the sound carrying across the still lake. Oh God, he should be playing the solo. It would be tragic if Lionel persuaded George to drop the Requiem. Lionel was also poisoning the orchestra against her. How she longed to follow the path of meadowsweet down the stream and ask Viking’s advice.

Maria Kusak, who was playing the Brahms Violin Concerto, was yet another Shepherd Denston artist booked at 10 per cent less, because the RSO had employed Abby. A contemporary of Abby’s at the Moscow Conservatoire, she was, like Benny, very jealous of Abby’s former success. A charming, curvacious, bottled blonde with high cheek-bones and naughty slanting brown eyes, she had been one of Rodney’s pets and was upset to find such a dear doting old man had been replaced by her greatest rival.

Lionel, after yesterday’s humiliation, was revving up for a showdown. He had already had a word with George.

‘I wept for my musicians,’ he repeated sententiously, ‘and she mocked me. It is an honour to sit in the first chair of a great orchestra, but how can I have any authority as a leader if she constantly undermines me in front of the players.’