A Song Begins (Warrender Saga Book 1) Read online

  Anthea was tempted to say that, if she were going to win a thousand pounds in open competition, she had got to put something pretty snappy before the public. But one glance at Miss Sharon’s face told her not to waste her breath. She agreed to “With Verdure Clad”, and the necessary application form was completed and sent in.

  Two days later Anthea received her entry card, with the somewhat depressing information that she was thirtieth on the list.

  “They’ll all be dead or stupefied with boredom by the time they get to me,” she lamented to Roland. But he determinedly cheered her with the assertion that she would wake them up all right when it came to her turn.

  On the appointed day — a wet and depressing Thursday — Anthea took herself off to the Town Hall, divided between giddy hopes and sickening despair.

  The contest was not open to the public, she was rather relieved to find, though several of the sponsors evidently considered it their right and privilege to be present, and the contestants were allowed to sit and hear each other if they wished. Anthea counted them anxiously, twice over, and found they numbered exactly thirty, which did nothing to brighten her view of her own position on the list.

  The hall — built in the heyday of Regency architecture — was quite exceptionally beautiful, with wonderful acoustics. It had no fixed seats, and it had been easy to set up chairs and tables for the judges about halfway down the hall. The aspiring artists were seated down either side, and each competitor was called up to the platform in turn, by name and number.

  Anthea sat there doggedly through the whole of the morning session, which disposed of at least half the number. At first she suffered agonies of nerves with each competitor. Partly on their behalf, but mostly because she had to view each one as a deadly rival.

  But, after a while, she began to feel more at ease. She tried to be objective, even to judge leniently. But she knew, with rising hope and relief, that no one so far had anything like the vocal equipment that she had.

  So then she turned her attention to the panel of judges. Among them she recognised the excellent choir-master from the nearby cathedral town (at least he would be able to judge the merits of her “With Verdure Clad”!), a well-known variety artist, and a couple of men whom she could not name but whose faces were vaguely familiar to her, probably from the television screen, she decided.

  In addition there was a well-dressed, interesting-looking woman — not young, but with an attraction which had nothing to do with age — and she evidently took the whole thing very seriously. This was in marked contrast to the man on her left. Good-looking, in a forceful rather intimidating way, he seemed bored most of the time, but occasionally roused himself to a glance of sardonic and incredulous amusement when some of the least gifted contestants paraded their offerings before the panel.

  Unlike the others, who all made copious notes, he wrote nothing on the sheet of paper in front of him, and Anthea strongly suspected that he had found no one worthy of even a brief comment so far. She was not sure if this cheered or scared her.

  At the lunch interval she allowed herself only a light snack, and when she was coming back she ran into Neil Prentiss, who greeted her with a warmth and friendliness which cheered her.

  “You’re looking very radiant and charming on this dismal day,” he said, taking in her appearance in one comprehensive, approving glance. “How is your father?”

  She reported on her father’s slight improvement, and then he went on,

  “Are you hoping to get in to hear the competition? If so, come with me. I’m hearing the afternoon session.”

  “I’m — I’m a competitor,” she confessed. “I’ve been there all the morning, but I don’t think I come on until the end.”

  “Then I’m glad I chose the afternoon session,” he declared, so heartily that she really felt he must mean it. “Who did they get for the judges, in the end?”

  Anthea told him about the choir-master and the variety artist, and the two whose faces were vaguely familiar.

  “Those will be Chester Vane and Anthony Bookham, I expect.”

  “Yes, I remember now,” she agreed. “I’ve seen them once or twice on television. Then there’s a very distinguished-looking woman, who evidently knows a lot about it – ”

  “Enid Mountjoy. She was a very successful concert and oratorio singer in her time. Teaches now in London.”

  “She’s very attractive still,” Anthea said. “Then there’s a rather horrid, bored-looking man with a supercilious air, who never makes a single note and looks as though he wonders why he’s there.”

  Neil Prentiss laughed and shook his head.

  “I don’t know who that would be. One of the directors, perhaps, who’s just there to dress the board.”

  “He doesn’t look quite like that,” Anthea said doubtfully. “Oh, look, there he goes,” she added in a whisper, as a tall, arresting figure crossed the corridor just ahead of them.

  “That? Why, my dear girl, that’s Oscar Warrender,” exclaimed her companion, sounding quite excited. “The famous conductor! They never really expected to get him. It was just a try-on. If he hadn’t been conducting last night in Liverpool — well, I must say we’re honoured.” And he laughed in a pleased sort of way, rather like a schoolboy whose headmaster has deigned to notice that he has scored six runs, Anthea thought.

  “Is that Oscar Warrender?” She was both elated and perturbed. For to be heard by the most celebrated conductor in the country was an exhilarating challenge. But the idea that that cold-eyed man carried more weight than anyone else on the panel was disturbing.

  “Cheer up!” Neil Prentiss patted her arm encouragingly. “At least he knows about it all, and you’ll get a worthwhile opinion.”

  Encouraged by this thought, Anthea returned to the hall, to find that the ranks had thinned considerably by now. And her immediate neighbour — a small, elfin-faced brunette with laughing eyes — whispered,

  “Have you heard? They turned down the lot.”

  “All of us, do you mean? — without even hearing us?” gasped Anthea indignantly.

  “No, no. All those that they heard this morning. I’ve got a cousin who’s related to someone in the know, and I had lunch with him, and he says some of the panel wanted to take a few of the competitors seriously. But Warrender — that’s the one with the fair hair and the good opinion of himself — said they weren’t even funny, and hadn’t a scrap of what he called star quality between them. There was a bit of an argument, but he carried his point. I must say it makes the grade seem pretty stiff.”

  It did indeed, and stealing a half resentful glance at the man who seemed to have swayed the others so ruthlessly, Anthea thought she detected a faint degree of satisfaction in his handsome, rather arrogant face. Really, he was odious! even if he was famous and a genius and all that.

  The harsh verdict on the morning competitors seemed to have shaken the confidence of the remainder badly. At any rate, the next few contenders were rather wild and ragged. And they too, at a slight gesture from the man who seemed pretty well to have taken over, were thanked perfunctorily and told not to wait.

  Then, quite near the end of the afternoon, Anthea’s neighbour was summoned. And, although there was a good deal of nervous tension about her, she went boldly to the platform and launched into a sort of musical sketch.

  She had very little real voice, and what she had was husky and rather curious, but she was quite extraordinarily funny and actually made the panel laugh. Even Oscar Warrender accorded her a faint smile. And then, suddenly, the sketch ended abruptly on a note of pathos, and the lightning change of mood, from gaiety to melancholy, was so effective that Anthea actually felt her throat tighten.

  The chairman of the panel called the girl over — the first time this had happened — and asked,

  “Where did you get your material, Miss Pine?”

  “I made it up,” said the small dark girl calmly, at which there was a ripple of interest right along the row of judges.
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  “Remarkable,” observed the chairman.

  “Quite brilliant,” declared the famous variety artist. And then the choir-master, speaking from one end of the row to Oscar Warrender, sitting at the other end, said almost apologetically,

  “Not exactly our line, I know, but “On the contrary, I find it very much my line,” replied the famous conductor, in a cool, well-modulated voice which carried ruthlessly well. “Miss Pine has a touch of the star quality I referred to. We aren’t likely to find anything more unusual this afternoon.”

  This was manifestly unfair, of course, to the half-dozen still waiting, and the chairman hastily murmured something, which obviously left Oscar Warrender unmoved. The small dark girl was asked to go back and wait, and the next number was called.

  A shy young man, with a large, lugubrious, completely untrained bass voice, boomed his way through his offering, and Anthea noticed that the famous conductor had now shut his eyes and appeared to be completely detached from what was going on around him.

  “I’ll make him take notice,” she thought furiously. “How dare he behave like this? It’s enough to take the heart out of anyone. If the others are scared, I won’t be!”

  And the heat of her anger sustained her right through the rest of the waiting time until — at last, at last — “Miss Benton, Number Thirty,” was called.

  “The last, I think,” said the chairman, stout-hearted to the end.

  “Thank God,” observed the conductor, insufferably and perfectly audibly.

  Sustained though she was by her anger, Anthea would have lost a good deal of her courage at that moment if she had not received from Neil Prentiss a brilliant and encouraging smile, as she walked to the platform.

  “I’ll sing for him!” she thought, overwhelmed by a rush of almost passionate gratitude. “I’ll sing for him because he likes me and wants me to succeed. I’ll forget about that arrogant beast – ”

  But, as she walked on to the platform, as though by some inner compulsion, her glance sought the arrogant beast, sitting there, his chin cupped now in a rather beautiful hand, his gaze fixed upon her with monumental indifference. And somehow she forgot about Neil Prentiss, after all, and sang for Oscar Warrender, because she knew that of all the people there he was, as Neil had said, the one who really knew all about it.

  Nothing in his expression changed. Only he glanced down once, and in the strong light she could even see that his lashes were unexpectedly long and cast a deep shadow on his cheeks. And, for the first time that day, he wrote something down on the paper in front of him.

  It is not always easy for a singer to hear him or herself. But Miss Sharon had taught Anthea, from the very beginning, that she must try to do so. And now — possibly because in the tension of the moment she almost stood outside herself, as it were — Anthea was able to hear her own full, bright, beautiful soprano voice rising on a splendidly firm line.

  She knew she was singing well. She knew that Miss Sharon herself could have found no fault with the phrasing. Perhaps her breath-control was not perfect to the end. But then she was nervous and excited, and she could not get over the fact that even Oscar Warrender had written something down at last.

  In the very last phrase she went slightly under the note, she knew. But she thought they would not hold that too much against her. They would know — even that beast of a conductor would know, surely? — that it had been a great ordeal to wait until the very end of the afternoon.

  With almost painful anxiety, her glance moved along the row of judges. The choir-master was leaning forward, faintly flushed, and Enid Mountjoy had stopped consulting her previous notes and was smiling. Even the variety artist nodded in a gesture of measured approval, while the chairman said frankly, “That’s a splendid voice!”

  “Completely without temperament, though,” said Oscar Warrender coolly. “Just good raw material. There’s no question about the real artist today, in my view. Miss Pine, in her individual way, is the worthwhile contestant.”

  The chairman fidgeted. It was evidently against all his intention that the final discussion should take place in front of the competitors, and he added hastily,

  “Thank you, Miss Benton. Will you wait, please?”

  Then he firmly gathered up his papers and ushered the others into one of the adjoining committee rooms, while Anthea and the dark girl, and two others who had been asked to wait, lingered aimlessly in what had now become the vast reaches of the audition hall, trying not to meet each other’s eyes, or to look either hopeful or as though they hated each other.

  This was much the worst part of all, for the judges took unbearably long, it seemed. And Anthea knew — as well as if she had been in that smaller room across the passage — that Oscar Warrender, of all people, was arguing away her chances.

  “Just good raw material” he had called her, as though she were some insensitive lump. And, even as he had said the words, she had felt the impact of her performance on the others insensibly lessen.

  At last the secretary to the chairman — an efficient and self-effacing gentleman noticed by no one until that moment — came back into the hall, and they all four rose instinctively to their feet.

  In a pleasant, congratulatory tone, he told the small dark girl that the panel of judges would like to see her. And to Anthea and the other two, he said,

  “Thank you very much. The panel were very happy to hear you, and though they couldn’t award you the prize, they hope to hear you on some other occasion.”

  It was said as nicely as possible. It was the kindly sugaring of a bitter, bitter pill. But only pride kept the tears from Anthea’s eyes and enabled her to say huskily, “Congratulations,” as the small dark girl hurried off.

  Out into the long deserted corridors once more, into the cold world of reality and crushing disappointment, after the wonderful days of hope and illusion. She tried to answer when one of the others — a cheerful young tenor -remarked, “Well, I suppose it was something to get into the last four.”

  But in her heart she thought, “It was nothing! Nothing unless one was first in the last four.”

  It was all the difference between a career and no career for her. Her great chance was gone. And in Anthea there was born at that moment, more strongly and more agonisingly than ever before, the absolute conviction that, given the smallest chance, she could have been a singer.

  She was crying when she finally stepped out into the darkened street. But she was alone by now, so it did not matter. Only now did she realise how desperately she had built all her hopes on this one afternoon. Only now did she find the acceptance of failure so utterly, utterly insupportable.

  And if Oscar Warrender had not intervened — he who was supposed to know so much about it! — she would have stood a good chance. She knew it. She felt so certain of the fact that it seemed to her that he had snatched away her rights from her.

  She ought to have had that precious prize. It was not conceit which made her sure of that. It was inescapable knowledge. The other girl was good — very good. She had charm and originality. And, incidentally, she seemed nice, so that one could not actually grudge her her good fortune. But she simply did not begin to have a voice, in the real sense of the word. And that conductor — the great operatic expert who was supposed to have such wonderful judgment — had insisted on her having the prize.

  At the fresh realisation of the injustice, Anthea allowed one deep sob to escape her. And, as she did so, she turned the corner of the Town Hall and ran full tilt into someone coming from the other direction.

  “Oh, my dear!” It was Neil Prentiss’s kind voice which fell upon her ears with infinite comfort, and he actually put his arms round her and gave her a warm, sympathetic hug. “Is it such a terrible disappointment?”

  “Y-yes.” She was past even pretending it was not. She could only take the handkerchief which he kindly offered, and scrub her eyes with it. “It meant — so much,” she whispered. “It would have been the money for my tr-training. An
d — I know it’s awful to say so — but I did have the best voice. I know it.”

  “I thought so too,” he agreed instantly. “I can’t imagine why Warrender chose otherwise. They always say he’s a capricious creature, of course. I suppose geniuses often are. But I should have thought there was no possibility of doubt.” He broke off, and gently released her, perhaps because she gave a movement of impatience. And then he added doubtfully, “He really is considered to know more about voices and voice-development than anyone in Europe. They say – ”

  “I don’t care what they say!” interrupted Anthea, quite loudly and rudely. “I think he’s an arrogant, self-satisfied beast. He was putting on an act the whole time! Pretending he was too good even to attend to what was going on. That man doesn’t really care about art or music or artists or anything else. All he cares about is the great Oscar War-render himself.” And, stepping back a pace, the better to look up at Neil Prentiss and emphasise her point, she cannoned violently into someone who was just emerging from a side exit.

  “Pardon me,” said a cold voice, and a quite painfully strong hand took her by the arm and put her aside. And then, as she stood gazing after him in mingled fury and dismay, Oscar Warrender crossed the pavement, got into a waiting car, and was driven away.

  “Oh — ” said Anthea, in a small, deflated sort of voice. And then, as courage reasserted itself, she added defiantly, “I’m glad! He can’t often have heard home-truths about himself.”

  “Not often,” agreed Neil Prentiss amusedly. “He’s a bit of a god in his own circle, I suppose. Most great conductors are.”

  And then, perhaps in tribute to Anthea’s rebellious explosion, he insisted on driving her home, and when he left her he said:

  “Don’t despair, my dear. If it’s true that they can’t keep a good man down, it’s even truer that they can’t keep a lovely, gifted girl down either.”